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.
Electricity production is not a monopoly and can work well as a market, but there needs to be oversight and rules for the trading.
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.
I'd argue that "it works" as in not experiencing blackouts is of significant benefit to the consumers.
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.
(also, there's the whole invasion of Ukraine going on, which has caused a massive disruption to the market)
It's basically impossible to see anything in the sky other than Jupiter here, because of the insane light pollution.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
Nothing against Germany.
In Italy, multiple days in July, in some areas.
The grid itself is fine, but it's backed by fossil fuels with no way out.
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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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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
I can't remember the last time the grid failed.