There are capacity markets, and the article spends a good portion talking about them (or more specifically why they believe energy only markets are superior).

How is it worse in Europe? Where in Europe is it worse?

I can't remember the last time the grid failed.

Exactly. If anything the electricity markets in Europe prove the point they can work.

It sort of depends on what you mean by markets. In most places in Europe the production of power is on the market, but the actual power grid is not freely traded. The grid is instead handed out to semi-permanent monopolies that are heavily regulated and controlled by governments and/or non-profit NGOs that are essentially a way we do efficient government in the supply sector.

It works, but the benefit isn’t usually to the consumers despite that being the intention. We’re currently seeing a load of insider trading and price manipulation cases roll into court after the price hikes following last years gas craze, and over all, power prices haven’t really gone down.

In many ways it’s mostly been a way to divert public money from the public services and into private investors. The way I pay for my electricity is that I pay for the grid, which is the non-freely-privatised part of your electricity market and makes up around 50% of my bill. Before it was privatised it was 90% less expensive. The other 50% is the actual electricity that I buy, we currently buy ours from a company of two people who buy and sell electricity on the European markets. This part is cheaper than it was before it was privatised, but the profits go to those two people and not into advancement of our electric grid.

The prices of electricity are also sort of heavily dependent on the government. A huge part of the income you get from running something like a solar plant is often going to be tariff because the EU can’t/won’t allow green energy to be traded freely as it would bankrupt fossil fuel plants, and you sort of need those since they can scale power at any time. Of course if it wasn’t privatised you could spend those tariffs, green euro and other subsidies on actually building the sector like you did with nuclear and fossil fuels. Not that I mind, I work in an investment bank that builds energy plants and sell them, so it’s good money, but it’s also sort of silly financially.

Like in Germany you have Tariffs where you only get the tariff if you don’t exceed the production max that’s set politically. So if you produce up to 99.9% you get your free money, but if you produce 100.1% you get zero tariff money. You obviously still get paid from the electricity production at whatever rate it’s capped at, at any given time. Then on top of that the government is paying you to shut down production during peaks so you don’t flood the European grid beyond capacity. Which is fine for us, but also sort of silly for consumers since it’s their tax money that’s basically used to make energy production a lucrative business for us.

So yeah, it works, there is a lot of money in it, and a lot of job creation, but it’s not really a net benefit for your consumers.

The grid is a natural monopoly, so it doesn't make sense to let private companies control it and a market wouldn't work.

Electricity production is not a monopoly and can work well as a market, but there needs to be oversight and rules for the trading.

There is the energy production, and there is the energy trading. It’s the traders who “deliver” the electricity to you, though in reality, it’s not since the actual grid doesn’t let the traders buy from a specific plant and deliver that specific power to your house.

So even if your energy company only buys power from green plants, like mine does, there is no guarantee that the power you actually consume wasn’t made by the fossil fuels plant next to you. It’s fine, but it’s also a little make belief.

Having very very few grid failures in Germany is a benefit to consumers, too. Price is only one dimension of consumer benefit.

There are very few grid failures under regulated systems too. Also, was said, the grid itself is a heavily regulated service.

The grid itself wasn’t build by the markets though, it was privatised after it was build.

> It works, but the benefit isn’t usually to the consumers despite that being the intention.

I'd argue that "it works" as in not experiencing blackouts is of significant benefit to the consumers.

> It works, but the benefit isn’t usually to the consumers despite that being the intention.

That was never the intention. The intention of the current iteration of EU electricity markets is to allow wind and solar electricity to be sold at the same price as power-plant electricity.

Wind and solar producers have virtually 0 marginal costs and make electricity at an unpredictable schedule. If there was no market and they had to negotiate long-term contracts with utilities and consumers, the price of their electricity would have been quite a lot cheaper than thermal and hydroelectric plants that produce electricity on demand.

Not sure what OP refers to but it isn't very long ago that we were paying over a dollar per kwh in Norway. We've always had extremely low energy prices due to our abundant hydroelectric power etc, but now it's all being sold to Germany or whatever and we get to buy their coal power for 30 times the price we're used to.

From the market's point of view selling to Germany distributes the goods more efficiently. Germans don't freeze in the Winter, while you don't keep office buildings lit up at night just because electricity is cheap. It feels like you're losing here, but on average everyone wins.

(also, there's the whole invasion of Ukraine going on, which has caused a massive disruption to the market)

Oh the offices are all on at night. No worries there.

Can’t for the life of me understand that particular Scandinavian peculiarity in what would seem otherwise very rational society. I assume it must have been logical or still is?

To be honest I have no idea. I'm baffled/enraged to walk at night and see rows of tall buildings completely lit up with nobody inside.

It's basically impossible to see anything in the sky other than Jupiter here, because of the insane light pollution.

For most homes and offices the primary source of heating is electrical, so in the winter it doens't really make much difference whether you turn the lights off or not, heat is heat. In the summer there's no excuse though. Old habits die hard, or something like that.

That said, modern LED-lighting doesn't really use that much electricity, all lights in my apartment use a total of 100Wh, or 75kWh per month. I could turn off all lights in my apartment for a year and it still wouldn't be close to the energy needed for a single transaction on the bitcoin blockchain. But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.

> For most homes and offices the primary source of heating is electrical

Source? I only know that people in isolated villa use electrical heating. Most apartments get hot water from a nearby garbage incinerator owned by the city.

> But clearly some speculative investment has more utility than me not stumping my toe when going to the bathroom at night.

We were talking about office buildings being fully lit 24h a day. Where nobody sleeps. Nobody is saying people should go to bed at 2pm in the winter.

Latest data is from 2012[0], but to counter to my own argument, I have district heating in my apartment. Outside of Oslo or any of the other "larger" cities in Norway I think you're hard pressed at finding anything like that, the population density is so low that it economy of scale for systems like that doesn't work out.

I'm not going to pretend that these office buildings don't exist, but usually they're not really empty. I've yet to be in an office without obnoxious motion sensors that don't work properly so you end up sitting in the darkness when working either early in the morning or late in the evening.

All that said, light pollution is a huge problem here. When I'm out hiking I don't really need a compass or anything to know the direction of Oslo, I can just look at the sky. I think the point I was trying to make is that lighting is a very small percentage of electricity usage, especially now with LED-lighting. In the winter I use the equivalent of 2000kWh/month for heating and hot water. Lighting would be 75kWh if I left all light on, all day, all night.

[0] https://www.ssb.no/energi-og-industri/statistikker/husenergi....

Yea, that was when we refused to buy natural gas from a dictator attacking sovereign countries.

And due to how the market was built, Germany's over-reliance on Russian gas affected everyone for a good while.

On the other hand I've been enjoying pretty much free electricity for about 6 months now. A few rare spikes up to 40c/kWh, but it's mostly been under 1c/kWh.

> A few rare spikes up to 40c/kWh, but it's mostly been under 1c/kWh.

The cheapest rate I can get in NL is ~30c/kwh, and that’s with a dynamic price contract.

The government has applied an artificial limit of 40c/kwh for 2023, after energy companies here fleeced everyone last year. Unfortunately, it expires by 2024.

The worst part is that NL privatized the energy market long ago, to give people “choice” - which has only led to coordinated exorbitant pricing.

Finland now has the opposite problem where the market price is negative at times. Our neighbours (Sweden, Estonia) are not able to import as much as we produce excess on good days. Luckily, more cables are being built and the variably cheap electricity attracts new industry that can make use of it (green hydrogen and green steel production).

I was one of those people who got fleeced. I moved here in the fall of 2022, right before winter started. My monthly fee to Vattenfall was €400/mo for an "A" rated new build apartment of 90m2. I had just moved and didn't know any better. I knew the war was contributing to energy prices but I had no idea to what extent.

Last winter, we kept the heat on to a minimum and tried to keep the lights off. Really, the killer was the price of gas for heating (in-floor) and hot water. But even by comparison, my 20 minute hot shower once every 2-3 days wasn't really the issue. Our "usage" for January was over €550. Luckily, I used basically nothing the first two months I lived here so it averaged out so I didn't need to pay anything. Had I known what I know now, I would have purchased electric space heaters and ran them 24/7... it probably would have been cheaper and I could have walked around my apartment naked while it was -2 outside.

I've switched to Tibber (Swedish company I think?) on a variable rate plan and have been much happier. It would be one thing if I could have locked in a rate at Vattenfall, but even that wasn't possible. You still pay out the ass for all of your usage, so I might as well not overpay when it's cheaper to produce. In the meantime, I'm saving some money each month for winter and will still likely invest in a couple of space heaters since the price of natural gas is still pretty high.

Now we've seen what some families have had to deal with paying their year-end balances and that is/should be criminal. I've seen people receiving bills for thousands of Euros. Their only crime was living in an older home with 2 kids. Got forbid you want your family to be clean and warm! I understand there is some personal responsibility to be taken, but obviously something went very very wrong.

Norway had trouble with hydro power because of low water levels. Compared to 2021, hydro power was down 10%, imports went up by 60%, and exports remained the same. And for the record, Germany didn't have any trouble with electricity last year, they exported records amounts of it, even increased the usage of gas to meet other countries' demands. Germany exported more electricity to Luxemburg than Norway exported to Germany - and while it seems popular for Norwegians here to claim that Germany wrecked their electricity market, I've yet to see a German claim that little Luxemburg caused electricity prices to explode in Germany.

I'm not saying it's Germany's fault, we're the ones selling them energy. Or rather a couple rich guys make shitloads of money while everyone else pays for their profits.

Nothing against Germany.

By "a couple of rich guys" are you referring to the fact that roughly 90% of all power production capacity is owned by the public via municipalities, regions and the state? (https://energifaktanorge.no/en/om-energisektoren/eierskap-i-...)

> I can't remember the last time the grid failed.

In Italy, multiple days in July, in some areas.

You're mixing up "the grid" (TSO) with your local delivery (DSO). The first one didn't fail recently. The second one depends on your distribution operator and is not on the market.

Europe is worse in carbon-free transition.

The grid itself is fine, but it's backed by fossil fuels with no way out.

What do you mean there's no way out? Some European countries have already stopped using fossil fuels, some are making good progress, in some the progress has recently stalled, some haven't really started yet...

Cheap electricity is going to be important for national economies and there are no countries that couldn't build cheap wind and solar (and/or cables to import neighbours' excess renewables production).

> Some European countries have already stopped using fossil fuels

Yes, the ones that have classic hydro.

> Cheap electricity is going to be important for national economies and there are no countries that couldn't build cheap wind and solar (and/or cables to import neighbours' excess renewables production).

Solar and wind ARE NOT cheap if you actually want them to be reliable. They are about 5x-10x more expensive than nuclear power in this case.

The problem is called Dunkelflaute. Here's an actual example: https://energy-charts.info/charts/power/chart.htm?l=de&c=DE&... - renewable generation mostly disappeared for a week from 18-th to 25-th. These kinds of events happen almost every year, and often more than once.

Worst-case modelling shows that Germany can get about a _month_ of sustained Dunkelflaute about once in a century.

We are not stuck and these issues are solvable (as much as they exist): trade of electricity with neighbouring countries, storage etc. For example, a simple thing where Germany could try to follow the Nordic countries is heat pump installations to keep houses warm without fossil fuels.

It is true that heating should be electrified … but it’s important to note that this makes the Dunkelflaute problem more serious, not less.

Because now your inflexible base-load has increased. And while spreading generation over a wider area helps, it rapidly reaches limits (unless your power grid extends close to the equator).

It makes it less serious in the north where shortage of electricity would mean freezing indoor temperatures. Heat pumps have reduced the amount of electricity needed (compared to direct electric heating) for heating a house and thus the amount of imports/storage needed. Also, if the heat pumps are a part of a district heating system, a heat storage solution can be included in the system.

In a country where heating isn't yet electrified, it's a way to reduce fossil fuel use and carbon emissions (the ultimate goal) without necessarily reducing the fossil electricity production. So even if it doesn't solve Dunkelflaute alone, it's a part of solving the climate and energy crises.

Germany is complicated, because they mostly use gas for heating, not electricity. So switching to heatpumps will require more generation. And for now this means new natural gas plants.

This is not _too_ bad in itself, using gas for generation and then powering heat pumps is more efficient than burning gas for heating. But the capital requirements for new power plants will cement Germany's dependence on fossil fuels for at least another 2 decades.

It's a mess.

> We are not stuck and these issues are solvable

I don't believe they are solvable with the existing approaches. Transition to natural gas from coal is possible, but there's nothing on the horizon after that.

The existing plans (if you can call them that) mostly depend on asterisks pointing to a footnote saying "magic happens here": cheap hydrogen, power-to-gas, radically cheaper batteries, etc.

> For example, a simple thing where Germany could try to follow the Nordic countries is heat pump installations to keep houses warm without fossil fuels.

They are trying. But they are already having problems with very expensive electricity. Which will only get worse, as demand climbs with more heat pumps.

> there's nothing on the horizon

We can build more of what we have, such as pumped hydro and EU-wide interconnections.

You mentioned the fear that the solutions will cost 5 times more than nuclear. That's not a horrible worst case scenario (as nuclear is so cheap ;-) and we can be sure that costs go down as the markets scale and technologies mature.

It may look bleak in Germany at the moment, but it certainly doesn't look bleak everywhere or for long.

a lot of the answer here is hydro. currently, hydro is seen primarily as a generation method, but as the amount of solar and wind increase, hydro increasingly becomes an easy way to fill the gap from dips in production. another short term answer is natural gas. if you run a natural gas plant 1 week a year, it's not ideal, but it's still 50x better than running it all the time.

I've read several studies that say that you're wrong. You need to get your information from other places than nuclear trade organizations.

The reason storage hasn't been yet been addressed much is simply that the demand is not there yet. But as one example, you can produce biogas and use the existing gas infrastructure.

> I've read several studies that say that you're wrong.

Well? Where's the plan then? The ones I've seen require taking a very stiff dose of crack and meth to make them believable.

> The reason storage hasn't been yet been addressed much is simply that the demand is not there yet.

Well, yeah. Europe has no capacity market, so cheap low-quality solar/wind is a good way to get return on investments. And wintertime generation is supported by fossil fuels that are still too cheap.

> But as one example, you can produce biogas and use the existing gas infrastructure.

"Biogas" can support only a tiny amount of consumption. Power-to-gas (methane produced from water and captured CO2) is an option, but the round-trip efficiency is poor and costs are too high.

> Europe is worse in carbon-free transition.

Than whom? The parent comment referred to Texas, let's extend that to an US/EU comparison in electricity production

The latest numbers I could find for either:

EU: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

US: https://www.epa.gov/power-sector/electric-power-sector-basic...

Nuclear + wind + solar + hydro in the EU was 57.8% vs 36.9% in the US, doesn't seem that much worse

More cross-border capacity would help with reliability as well as making the investments' profitability easier to estimate. This is something Europe at least is investing in.

PJM does have pricing for reliability.

The first California deregulated electricity market had an auction every half hour and all pricing was spot. This caused blackouts and the bankruptcy of Pacific Gas and Electric, even though it was what PG&E had lobbied for.

Today, most markets (at least PJM and CAISO) have a "day ahead" auction, and a current auction to fine-tune. Most of the market is in the day-ahead auction. This seems to have reasonable stability.

I've read that the overall effect of electricity deregulation is that prices are slightly lower, and reliability is down. Rate-of-return regulation encourages utilities to overbuild somewhat, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Beats under-building.

Weren’t the California brownouts caused by Enron fucking with California’s supply to cause them to purchase electricity from Texas at insanely high rates. Also led to Gray Davis being recalled which must have been a nice bonus because the Bush administration was very allied with Enron execs.

> Weren’t the California brownouts caused by Enron fucking with California’s supply to cause them to purchase electricity from Texas at insanely high rates.

The Texas grid (ERCOT, specifically) is almost completely isolated, in order to avoid certain Federal level regulations. There's no real way for California or any other state to sell power into Texas or buy power from Texas.

Part of what happened with California is that Enron would schedule to deliver a bunch of power over transmission lines that were not rated to handle the power. When it came time to deliver the power, this forced a transmission constraint that in turn forced CAISO (CA grid operator) to buy power on the spot market (expensive) to cover the shortfall. Enron then had generation they could sell at a premium. I remember hearing stories of the ISO seeing the trade go in, recognize what was happening, and not have any legal recourse within the market's legal design.

I've been meaning to find some decently in-depth explanation of what market manipulations happened. Found this one: http://www.mresearch.com/pdfs/19.pdf

Day ahead isn't enough. Need capacity markets & year ahead futures from what I remember last time I read up.

California providers are required to purchase "Resource Adequacy" contracts. Those that are badly managed try to dodge the expense, rather like operating a business without insurance:

https://thecoastnews.com/cpuc-issues-over-1-million-in-fines...

IIRC, the only US ISO without a capacity market is ERCOT (TX). They let the marginal rates go higher on the theory that it will create an incentive for construction of generation to address anticipated capacity constraints.

> I've read that the overall effect of electricity deregulation is that prices are slightly lower, and reliability is down.

One interesting option is the option to let customers choose where they want to be on the reliability vs price scale.

Typically, in times of crisis due to undersupply, an electricity network cuts off customers (blackouts).

However, this needent happen at the district/region level. It could just as easily be implemented by your own electricity meter - effectively a breaker which opens when it detects crisis.

Crisis can be fairly easily measured from the power itself - when the supply of electricity is tight, the frequency and voltage drop.

That means a supplier could theoretically have customers choose what reliability they wanted, and set a switch on the back of their electricity meter to give them the reliability they had paid for.

The downside is that this system only works if the majority of electricity meters behave this way.

> One interesting option is the option to let customers choose where they want to be on the reliability vs price scale. ... > t could just as easily be implemented by your own electricity meter - effectively a breaker which opens when it detects crisis.

What you're really talking about is demand response. It's been around a while in both commercial and residential settings.

It doesn't really address reliability to the extent that reliability depends on investments in distribution, transmission, generation, fuel to the generators, etc. If those aren't there, it doesn't matter if the user has opted into reliable (non-interruptable) power, because the power won't reliably be at the meter to begin with.

It addresses reliability by shedding the customers who don't pay a premium for reliability first. Most of the time, that can solve the problem. It is, as you say, imperfect because it doesn't allow that premium to be used to fund investment in reliable generation.

Actually, electricity markets in Europe work just fine, and provide in fact a lot of required stability. And income events are pretty much instantanious. The only problem European markets have is way too low costs for CO2 certificates which make coal plants way to cheap. Other than that, they work just fine.

Nope. They are not fine. Europe is floundering with its renewable transition.

Right now it's easy to build tons of cheap low-quality wind or solar generation, but it's not economic to build any kind of storage. As a result, Europe is now dependent on natural gas and coal during the winter.

And there's nothing that can change that within the next decade.

Strong claims. Any evidence to back them up, besides "Germany shutting nuclear stupid"?

Germany is the main culprit. There's no plan for fossil fuel phaseout in Germany, or for most of the European countries that are not blessed with almost limitless hydroenergy.

Cheap renewables allowed Europe to quickly slash some emissions, but now they're hitting a hard wall of reality: the wintertime sucks for renewables in Europe.

Germany will exit coal none later than 2038. I guess the rest of comment is just as wrong as the first claim. You still didn't bring up nuclear, I am almost surprised.

Yeah, and it'll switch to natgas. Great improvement. Not.

Youbsaid Germany doesn't have a plan to exit fossil fuels. I showed they in fact do. You are not happy, fair enough.

But since everything being done is either not enough or not feasible, what exactly is your proposal?

> I showed they in fact do.

You actually haven't shown that. Coal exit does not mean fossil fuel exit.

And I have not seen an actual plan to get out of fossil fuels, apart from general hand-waving.

And I mean an actual plan, with detailed location of new power storage plants, exact targets for renewables, etc.

Such a plan is currently being prepared for coal. Gas, as a means to cover peaks on short notice, is still needed so, but also much better than coal, especially at significantly lower volumes.

This is a classic case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And revamping huge portions of an energy grid, and generation base, is nothing that is done easily or fast.

Edit: Source in German:

https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...

> This is a classic case of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good

No. If you say they're exiting fossil fuels, but they're moving on to gas, your claim is just wrong. Gas might be better than coal, but that wasn't the claim.

Oh dear... They have a plan to exit the dirtiest form fossil fuel, one Germany heavily relies on today. I did not say Germany is gonna move to gas, since I didn't read everything, that was just an assumption.

So, what you say is the current plan to exit coal, which you initially claimed didn't exist, is garbish because the result might include some gas. And hence, there is no such plan, and even if there was, said plan wouldn't be feasible because of reasons.

That is exactly getting a (poorly defined) perfect in the way of the good.

Edit: Just realized I replied to another commenter, so please replace "you" with GP.

Again, this isn't about gas being better than coal. It's that the claim was they're exiting fossil fuels, when they aren't.

Aren't you saying the same thing? If externalities were priced appropriately, then storage probably would be a good investment.

I have hard time seeing that electricity markets in Europe were designed with a view to achieving a renewable transition (some lib service notwithstanding), so not sure that is a failure of the market as designed.

"Europe" is not a country.

France finished it's nuclear build-out decades ago. It's still got issues, but the matter is sorted.

The UK is adding scads of wind power every day.

Ditto for Spain, only with solar.

Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Finland have mix of hydro, nuclear, and renewables.

Yes, Germany is screwing the pooch on this one. Most places east of Germany isn't doing much better. But their failure is theirs, and not their Western and Northern neighbours.

The wind power over here is nice, but hopefully the nuclear gets rolling[0].

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61010605

Unfortunately, "UK Plans..." has become statements for the purpose of electioneering rather than serious intent.

See also the list of announced projects that mere days later had to said to be "illustrative": https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/09/list-of-proj...

The western neighbours have outsized influence on EU policy compared to the east, of course they have to take part of the blame.

EU energy policy made visible changes on the markets and landscape of the eastern republics - and the people here hate the EU for it.

For example, it created a whole class of "solar barons" who used the EU regulation to get free money that now everyone has to pay for, and for the necessary energy storage that the "barons" are not on the hook for. The population here would've preferred to go nuclear, but EU forced it to support this instead.

Specifically what EU policies that the more renewable-and-nuclear friendly countries voted for do you have in mind?

The EU green deal was specifically anti-nuclear until very recently. What I'm talking about started in 2008 and finished around 2012 (though we're going to be paying for it for many decades).

Yes, it was made pro-nuclear under pressure from France. But even before then, the only countries with more nuclear power than the EU (that aren't also in the EU) are Ukraine (which is on the European grid), Switzerland (also on the European grid), Armenia and South Korea.

Europe's revealed preferences makes it the most pro-nuclear region in the world, by far.

Wut? Their anti-nuclear policy reveals them as pro-nuclear? What new nuclear was built during the last 2 decades, before they had to change the anti-nuclear policy?

The population is pro-nuclear, sure. But the policy was set by the anti-nuclear supporters of the green deal and we had to wait for many years until reality forced them to accept nuclear.

Again, the energy policy of Europe has resulted in them having more nuclear than anywhere else in the world, besides South Korea. Everything you say about Europe as a whole being anti-nuclear is more applicable to almost every other country globally. Because Europe has more nuclear than basically everywhere else.

> What new nuclear was built during the last 2 decades

More than the US, believe it or not. Between new reactors in Finland, France, and Slovakia, around 3,700 MWe versus the US at around 2,200 MWe from reactors in Tennessee and Georgia.

I'm not saying energy policy has been good in EUrope over the last 2 decades, but it's not been uniquely worse than the rest of the Western world.

I don't care about the rest of the world. The rest of the world can do whatever. My state doesn't have natural gas or oil, nor a lot of sunshine or wind, nor a lot of rivers.

I care about my taxes (and I don't mean EU subsidies here) going to solar baron's pocket instead of nuclear reactors.

The few projects you listed - you seriously think that's enough? I don't. We can see in practice that all the money spent on solar and wind led us to over dependence on fossil fuels, not their abolishment, and now we have to spend another absurd amount of money on storage to solve that.

It's a failed anti-nuclear policy that's thankfully reversed now but that doesn't change history. I really don't care about the US, or frankly, Slovakia and France. I care about my own home.

BTW, it's funny that all the projects you listed were started way before the green deal. IMHO you just confirmed what I said.

>The UK is adding scads of wind power every day.

Yeah about that wind

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/08/what-wen...

Surely if the generation is so cheap why won't anyone commit to more turbines?

It says right there in the article - costs went up for turbines operators, and the government didn't change the amount they'd pay. It's hard to miss.

Worth seeing contracts for onshore wind went fast though.

Europe has a very robust energy market. The Ukrainian war put a lot of stress on it last winter. The lights stayed on. Sure prices rose a little and that sent off a strong price signal for people to conserve energy and invest in alternative solutions. Exactly what you'd hope for in a well functioning market. The European market is all interconnected. You might get electrons from Norwegian hydro, German or Danish wind, or Spanish solar. Or a mix of all of those. And of course there are loads of coal, nuclear, and gas plants connected to the grid as well. There's plenty of generation capacity. The main technical challenge is cables, not generation. More cables means better energy distribution and more competitive pricing.

A lot of French nuclear plants being down for maintenance right in the middle of the Ukrainian crisis did not result in rolling blackouts. Instead it resulted price signals for others to step up their energy production and serve that demand. The bad thing was that that was German coal. But the good thing is that it worked. Coal is expensive, so the price signals exist to get rid of it. Renewables are cheap, so there's a shift from coal to renewables in most places with a functioning market.

The European energy market is much more dynamic than the US. In the US you have Texas basically disconnected from the rest of the US market for ideological reasons and local monopolists both setting prices and dictating what home owners can and cannot do with things like solar.

The Texas grid collapsed there when it got a bit cold and gas pipes and coal piles froze up. The local monopolists created a price signal but were not able to produce the required energy supply. And as they were unable to import any energy, they had to do rolling blackouts. They should be exporting clean energy most of the time. There's plenty of it. Why is that not a thing? Don't they like money there? Classic example of a broken market. The fix is changing the policies that prevent competitors from challenging the status quo. There's no shortage of entrepreneurs in Texas. They could fix it in no time.

In the UK at least - The prices were put up before the Ukrainian war, but then that was used as an excuse.

> pretty much nobody wants to wait 5-10 years between "income events".

Insurance is a similar market - and big earthquakes might wipe out a whole decades profits.

Yet there are still plenty of players in that market.

> Insurance is a similar market - and big earthquakes might wipe out a whole decades profits.

So not similar but reveres. Big earthquake is an "expenditure event" for an insurance company, not an "income event".

It's a market - so the counterparty has a big expenditure event when the power prices go sky high yet they are selling onwards to a consumer at fixed pricing.

The Texas grid has not suffered any collapses that I am aware of

?

I can think of at least three. (1989, 2011, 2021)

Maybe you can quibble over the definition of 'collapse', but in each of those three events there was a significant inability of the grid to meet demand (and subsequent involuntary demand curtailment).

I'm not sure about USA but in Poland whoever mispredicted production/consumption - pays for balancing the network back. So there's quite strong incentive for reliable predictions.

When sources were inherently dispatchable, like coal/oil/gas, reliability was free. Markets have not been updated to reflect the value of reliability. It may be just an oversight of slow moving regulators. Or it may be intentional to allow the growth of unreliable wind and solar without making them bear their own cost of unreliability.