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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2024
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Lemmy and the nuclear propaganda is so funny. France recently increased the electricity prices because nuclear energy is way more expensive than solar and they will have to increase them again because half of their plants are in severe need of repair.
It's a tricky thing, but renewables and nuclear fission plants are not two mutually exclusive things that can't coexist. The issue with renewables is that, right now, they are not consistent enough to be relied upon 24/7, and we don't have, right now, a good enough storage technology to solve the issue.
Without this, the only other option is to have renewables cover 30-50% of the production capacity, and another technology to provide a base capacity when renewables cannot be used. This can be hydro, if you have it, nuclear, gas or coal. Choose your poison.
There's some promising research in using heliostats (mirrors to direct sunlight) towards a central tower to create molten salt, allowing solar energy to be stored and released at night.
they're cool, but have weird problems, the one in mojave, had issues with literally vaporizing birds, which might be worse than traditional wind turbines. Considering you can see them.
The mirrors are incredibly susceptible to dust and debris, being in a desert doesn't help all that much, so they have to be regularly cleaned. The actual mechanism of heat conversion works, but you can just do the same thing with electric resistive heat and solar, or wind, as heat storage so meh. Though it probably doesn't work quite as well.
This!
Problem is not producing electricity, problem is producing electricity ON DEMAND. That is something only Fossil fuels can do for now.
I have high hopes for EVs being used as a decentralized buffer via V2G. I'm thinking of something like you either buy an EV outright and you have no obligations to participate in V2G, but can sell electricity that way if you wish. Or, the government subsidizes your car to a certain extent but you have to give maybe 20% of your battery up as a buffer as long as it's connected to the grid.
Geothermal too is possible
it's expensive because france is skill issuing with the EPR and EPR2 reactor which are incredibly complex and technically complicated PWR plants.
Nuclear energy while traditionally expensive, is incredibly rip for government subsidies considering most of the build cost is up front construction, which can also be eased with much simpler plants (non EPR plants) And also have a skilled manufacturing base capable of actually fucking making the thing lmao.
even if fuel is cheap it's still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.
or i mean, super, nuclear is obviously what society needs, because energy supply is a natural monopoly and nuclear uses fuel you can burn based on demand and guaranteed awesome profit as a private entity unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.
even if fuel is cheap it’s still has an upfront cost per production and can be manipulated based on demand to ensure prices never drop and always go up.
sounds like capitalistic free markets to me. I see nothing unusual here.
unlike infinite energy resources that produces surplus energy and only benefits society and not the shareholders and owners who are the only ones who obviously matter.
i realize this is sarcastic, but who do you think owns solar and wind plants?
Lol get rekt fossil fuel barons
I'm a Fiscally Responsible American Republican and this is EXACTLY why we SHOULDN'T transition away from Oil! Imagine all the RESEARCH into YACHTS and MANSIONS the CEOS can't do now that prices are NEGATIVE!
is this end consumer prices? This sounds more like we're totalling in french energy exports, (france exports a LOT of nuclear energy, as well presumably, renewable)
I'm not French nut usually the price of transmission is omitted, netting in a positive cost for end consumers. If it was really negative, there would be businesses just burning energy to make money.
Battery business should be good in the future though.
yeah, the only case where power companies would pay people to consume power would be the event that they are over producing, and have nowhere for it to go, which would be actively harmful, nuclear plants will lose money if you aren't selling energy, but it doesn't make sense to buy that energy yourself, you would just let it burn. Or maybe the government would subsidize burning it, i don't know. Generally this kind of thing happens in a really unstable electricity market. It's not that ideal.
Energy storage is going to be a huge business though, i think batteries are probably going to be common than people think, compared to things like thermal storage, though i guess it all depends on how expensive batteries are in comparison more than anything.
French government make electricity price scale on the most expansive one. So with the war in Ukraine, the price of gas plumed up, and so do every electricity bill that was never so expansive, by far.
The "liberalization of energy market" force everyone to buy electricity from courrier that don't do anything; they do not produce or invest, they just buy and sell electricity. This firms take all the money between the price and the cost. This severely threat the electricity production, that is still made by the former public firm (ex « Électricité de France » ); even if it's electricity is the cheapest, and it's the firm that invest the more in renewable energy.
yeah that sounds about right, we have a similar structure here in the US with power co-ops, and generation sellers, and then end consumers. In our local case we have generators, running through a co-op. Which is running through another co-op which is then being sold to end consumers.
Gotta love modern economics.
Negative? Sounds like music to the crypto-miners. Heck, can I get paid for shorting two wires together?
Usually in addition to electricity itself you pay for using the power grid per kWh. IIRC here in Finland it's around 0.07€/kWh. At one point due to some error the price of electricity went down to like -0.20€ and we were indeed paid to use electricity. Though we paid back with more expensive electricity a while after.
Paywalled article
Short way of saying "I use the wrong browser"
You don't like Floorp?
Just a note to say that this is the electricity market breaking down - don't celebrate it! France has had low-carbon energy since the 70s when they built a load of nuclear power. The have started building renewable plants rather than updating the nuclear plants. Electricity cannot be stored in the amounts that we use it. So many statistics about wind/solar quote power act like we can use it all... but an installation battery that could store a country like France's worth of energy for 12 hours (solar never works at night) would be the biggest megastructure humans have built*. During a period of high pressure a whole country might get little wind for a week. Also, check out this map if you visit regularly the low carbon energy solutions are nuclear or hydro... the only countries that reliably don't burn fossil fuels use these. [edit: clarity, *edit: Not quite-about 100mx100mx50m, approximately the same size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, but made of flammable material - I got confused with something that could provide a week or two for windless anticyclones]