19 ms·

Norway mostly generate electricity from renewable sources, some 99% of our annual production (~120TWh, if memory serves) is hydro-electric. We've seen prices b

by lb1lf 5y ago

Norway mostly generate electricity from renewable sources, some 99% of our annual production (~120TWh, if memory serves) is hydro-electric. We've seen prices becoming more volatile in later years as our domestic market has become more interconnected with that of continental Europe. Normally, I'd be all in favour of being part of a larger, working market; however with European countries phasing out coal (makes sense) and nuclear (makes less sense), supply is being cut while demand soars; hardly a recipe for stable prices. It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks.

Ericson2314 5y ago
There's a bit of a backlash again shutting down right now. Fingers crossed Germany doesn't get what it wants for the EU for a change, and that pans out. (Editted to make clear I meant EU wide, not within Germany)
- patall 5y ago
  The last nuclear power plant in Germany will get shutdown in less than 15 months. With that in mind, there have been no investments into them for years. You won't be able to keep them running by simple maintenance. That ship has sailed for years. What do you expect to happen?
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    A big issue is that Germany, in trying to classify gas but not nuclear as "green", is trying to get every other country to do the same. The insanity must at least be stopped at Germany's boarders.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  A couple years of worse prices from phasing coal out more quickly seem like nothing compared to the long term effects of climate change. If we're taking about nuclear: I don't see any chance of Germany halting its phase-out of current nuclear plants. New plants meanwhile don't seem sensible economically
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    The first step I think is making nuclear count as "green" for the the EU subsidies, and natural gas not. Even if no one builds nukes with that plan, then at least all the green parties will be having more public internal battles over the issue. See https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-strategic-sectors-including-nuclear-to-boost-independence/ https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-str... for example for Macron staking his campaign on the nuclear subsidies.
  - didericis 5y ago
    If we want to adequately prepare for the long term affects of climate change it seems like dykes, irrigation projects, improved farming methods, displacement preparation for affected third world areas, and solutions to mitigate effects regardless of source would be wiser. Freeman Dyson spoke about this. There’s by no means a guarantee that stopping anthropogenic climate change would stop the long term deleterious effects of natural climate change from still occurring. Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.
    - wongarsu 5y ago
      We are building plenty of dykes. But every additional centimetre of sea level rise we cause is at least one more centimetre of dyke we have to maintain along all shores, indefinitely. And on top of that all the additional defences against intense rainfall in cities and along all major rivers. From a purely monetary standpoint it's hard to find an investment that pays greater dividends for a society over the decades and centuries than one that reduces climate change
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  There's only 8GW remaining nuclear capacity in Germany. Shutting that down won't be a major challenge or matter that much in the grand scheme of things. 8GW is only a tiny percentage of the overall market. Germany had 22GW 20 years ago. 16 is gone, the rest will be gone in a few years. It won't matter. Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. Likewise, nuclear darling France is looking to reduce nuclear from about 70% of their energy supply now to about 50%
  - heurisko 5y ago
    > Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. The difficulty is that the renewables don't provide baseline power. Ironically, this baseline is now sometimes coming from French nuclear power plants. I respect Germany's concern about nuclear, but the Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
    - labawi 5y ago
      Baseline power is a concept suitable only to describe a grid that operates in a specific configuration (cheap slow stable source + expensive dispatchable source), but not in any way a principal requirement. You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones). If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
      - liketochill 5y ago
        I think baseline means power plant that is always available, except for outages planned well in advance, and runs 24x7 at a given output. Generally baseline power doesn’t depend on the weather. You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today. I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.
cinntaile 5y ago
I wouldn't want to be Norway in a year with unusually little rain without being part of a bigger market.
- bergesenha 5y ago
  We can store several years of surplus.
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    You can but that doesn't help if there is no surplus water to store. You can store 82TWh and your yearly consumption is about 500TWh. NO3 and NO5 are pretty much at their lowest points in the last 28 years, it's not a problem at all though because right now that's about 71% and 61% respectively. There are of course up- and downsides to being connected. An important upside would be that when you're connected to other markets you can import electricity when the price is low and pump the water back into the reservoirs to release it when the price is high again.
- hkon 5y ago
  My electricity bill for september is 10x (ten times) what it was one year ago, very similar kwh. I like being connected to the bigger market alot :D /s
TomK32 5y ago
Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old, they simply can't be operated for centuries, instead the are becoming unreliable. In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production. Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules, OL3 in Finland with a 12 year delay. https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-union https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un... You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules Given China appears able to build quality reactors quickly, this would seem to be the result of European policy preferences with respect to nuclear.
  - ericd 5y ago
    Not saying they’re not, but I’d be curious what measures of reactor quality you’ve seen?
    - GordonS 5y ago
      Number of severe incidents divided by number of reactor days?
      - rgbrenner 5y ago
        China has the newest plants in the world: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-of-nuclear-power-capacity-in-selected-regions-2019 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-o... We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.
bumby 5y ago
Why wouldn't using hydro to full capacity as part of the base load be a preferred option? Is there less stability in hydroelectric?
- lb1lf 5y ago
  The good thing about hydro is that, unlike thermal plants, you can regulate power output fast to match demand. Hence, it makes sense to use hydro for handling peaks, not baseline supply.
- shagie 5y ago
  Hydro has other issues associated with it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-stakes-math-behind-the-wests-greatest-river/?sh=56b6fcb2222b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s... Things like "there's more potential available in the spring than in the fall (or winter). > Those margins are doubly difficult to master given the temperamental pulse of a river whose volume increases by a factor of five every spring as snow melts in the Rockies. Within the river’s seasonal changes come manmade fluctuations: every morning its dams awaken the Columbia with surges of water to satisfy the Northwest’s demand for electricity, and every evening the dams tighten their gates to put the river back to sleep. And every other second, an automated system assesses the supply of electricity against demand and makes tiny adjustments to the volume of water moving through each dam’s turbines. Things like drought will also change that capacity of generation. https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-21st-centurys-hoover-dam https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-21st-centurys-hoover-dam Regarding base load - https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/667 https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/667 - table 9.1 has the capacity factor. > In the table above, the lower the capacity factor, the more susceptible the system to potential interruptions or drops in performance. We can see that solar and wind technologies, which are notoriously weather-dependent have the lowest CF numbers. At the same time, nuclear power and coal systems are most advantageous when operated continuously and at full load. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 90.3. Hydro is 39.8. Concentrating solar is 33, wind is 20-40 range depending on geography and photovoltaic solar is 15-19. More on that concept - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor Hydro is the best of the renewable non-fossil fuel base load sources, but it still is poor compared to nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation for base load.
yobbo 5y ago
The problem is that power from wind is random. To match supply=demand, a regulating/controllable power-source like coal/gas/hydro is needed. Because Europe is closing their coal/nuclear plants and hoping to replace them with wind, they end up using Scandinavian hydro-power to match supply/demand. This is currently a catastrophe for Scandinavian prices.
pfdietz 5y ago
> Norway mostly generate electricity from renewable sources, some 99% of our annual production (~120TWh, if memory serves) is hydro-electric. Wind accounted for 6.4% (9.9 TWh) of electric production in Norway in 2020. Total production in Norway in 2020 was 154.2 TWh. https://norwaytoday.info/news/wind-power-production-in-norway-increased-sharply-last-year/ https://norwaytoday.info/news/wind-power-production-in-norwa...
HPsquared 5y ago
I read somewhere that Norway could become Europe's "battery" - the terrain is ideal for building pumped-storage hydro plants, which can store and release electricity to even out the gaps in renewables.
cm2187 5y ago
I am highly skeptical of increasing dependencies between countries on energy when I see this sort of headline: https://news.sky.com/story/france-threatens-to-cut-off-uks-energy-again-in-new-fishing-row-12426857 https://news.sky.com/story/france-threatens-to-cut-off-uks-e...
timeon 5y ago
Not only continental Europe. Connection to UK is not cheap. But this network is not there because they are phasing out some power plants. Import from Norway is relatively small.
eru 5y ago
> We've seen prices becoming more volatile in later years as our domestic market has become more interconnected with that of continental Europe. Differences in prices both between locations and over time can be turned into money. The first with cables, the second with batteries. In the process, the arbitrager smooths out the price differences. Give it a bit of time, and you'll see more stable prices again. (Unless politics throws a spanner in the works, of course.) > It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks. Oh, and don't forget the ability to regulate demand up and down. Plenty of industrial consumers already have contracts like that, and thanks to 'smart' devices, this technology can come to private consumers as well. Eg assume your short term weather forecasts says that we have plenty of wind now, but there will be a lull in fifteen minutes. So you just tell all the fridges and hot water tanks to cool respectively heat now, so they have some stored thermal energy to get over the lull. Similarly for electric cars charging (you don't even have to take energy out of their batteries back into the grid, it's already useful to be able to suspend their charging for a while and resume later). This is mostly not a problem of high technology, but a problem of coordination. In principle, you also don't need your power company to directly talk to your fridge: whatever controls your home just needs a short term forecast of electricity prices in the next few hours, and can then decide autonomously and in harmony with your preferences.

by lb1lf 5y ago

Ericson2314 5y ago

There's a bit of a backlash again shutting down right now. Fingers crossed Germany doesn't get what it wants for the EU for a change, and that pans out. (Editted to make clear I meant EU wide, not within Germany)

patall 5y ago
The last nuclear power plant in Germany will get shutdown in less than 15 months. With that in mind, there have been no investments into them for years. You won't be able to keep them running by simple maintenance. That ship has sailed for years. What do you expect to happen?
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  A big issue is that Germany, in trying to classify gas but not nuclear as "green", is trying to get every other country to do the same. The insanity must at least be stopped at Germany's boarders.
wongarsu 5y ago
A couple years of worse prices from phasing coal out more quickly seem like nothing compared to the long term effects of climate change. If we're taking about nuclear: I don't see any chance of Germany halting its phase-out of current nuclear plants. New plants meanwhile don't seem sensible economically
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  The first step I think is making nuclear count as "green" for the the EU subsidies, and natural gas not. Even if no one builds nukes with that plan, then at least all the green parties will be having more public internal battles over the issue. See https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-strategic-sectors-including-nuclear-to-boost-independence/ https://www.politico.eu/article/france-injects-e30b-into-str... for example for Macron staking his campaign on the nuclear subsidies.
- didericis 5y ago
  If we want to adequately prepare for the long term affects of climate change it seems like dykes, irrigation projects, improved farming methods, displacement preparation for affected third world areas, and solutions to mitigate effects regardless of source would be wiser. Freeman Dyson spoke about this. There’s by no means a guarantee that stopping anthropogenic climate change would stop the long term deleterious effects of natural climate change from still occurring. Making the power grid less responsive and more weather dependent is making civilization less adaptive to climate change with no guarantees of stopping climate change, so treating a phase out of coal without adequate replacement like it’s beneficial in the long term doesn’t make sense to me. Reducing coal makes sense, but not at the expense of a less adaptive more weather dependent power grid. Nuclear salt reactors seem like the obvious choice for a replacement from all angles, including CO2, access to fuel, energy output, independence from weather, etc. The only reason why they’re not replacing coal and renewables seems to be regulation and PR. I think the R&D for a lot of them are already done, and they’re much cheaper to maintain and produce/believe a lot of modern designs are quite simple. Most of the expense seems to be from regulatory burden and old laws about different reactors.
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    We are building plenty of dykes. But every additional centimetre of sea level rise we cause is at least one more centimetre of dyke we have to maintain along all shores, indefinitely. And on top of that all the additional defences against intense rainfall in cities and along all major rivers. From a purely monetary standpoint it's hard to find an investment that pays greater dividends for a society over the decades and centuries than one that reduces climate change
jillesvangurp 5y ago
There's only 8GW remaining nuclear capacity in Germany. Shutting that down won't be a major challenge or matter that much in the grand scheme of things. 8GW is only a tiny percentage of the overall market. Germany had 22GW 20 years ago. 16 is gone, the rest will be gone in a few years. It won't matter. Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. Likewise, nuclear darling France is looking to reduce nuclear from about 70% of their energy supply now to about 50%
- heurisko 5y ago
  > Wind and solar each provide close to 3x the capacity nuclear ever did. The difficulty is that the renewables don't provide baseline power. Ironically, this baseline is now sometimes coming from French nuclear power plants. I respect Germany's concern about nuclear, but the Energiewende hasn't always been practical.
  - labawi 5y ago
    Baseline power is a concept suitable only to describe a grid that operates in a specific configuration (cheap slow stable source + expensive dispatchable source), but not in any way a principal requirement. You can have a stable power grid with ample supply and 0% "baseline" generation no problem (other than the usual generic ones). If you have specific concerns about renewables please be more specific. Yes, they have different issues and different benefits. They are surmountable.
    - liketochill 5y ago
      I think baseline means power plant that is always available, except for outages planned well in advance, and runs 24x7 at a given output. Generally baseline power doesn’t depend on the weather. You could have a stable reliable grid consisting solely of wind and solar but it would also require a lot of storage, which would be insanely expensive in order to achieve the level of reliability we take for granted today. I am sure we will find the limit of penetration for wind and solar, and already people are willing to give up and accept blackouts like in California instead of brushing under the power lines and cutting down trees which might fall on them proactively, which is expensive, they just have a blackout on hot windy days.

cinntaile 5y ago

I wouldn't want to be Norway in a year with unusually little rain without being part of a bigger market.

bergesenha 5y ago
We can store several years of surplus.
- cinntaile 5y ago
  You can but that doesn't help if there is no surplus water to store. You can store 82TWh and your yearly consumption is about 500TWh. NO3 and NO5 are pretty much at their lowest points in the last 28 years, it's not a problem at all though because right now that's about 71% and 61% respectively. There are of course up- and downsides to being connected. An important upside would be that when you're connected to other markets you can import electricity when the price is low and pump the water back into the reservoirs to release it when the price is high again.
hkon 5y ago
My electricity bill for september is 10x (ten times) what it was one year ago, very similar kwh. I like being connected to the bigger market alot :D /s

TomK32 5y ago

Well, Europe's nuclear power plants are on average more than 35 years old, they simply can't be operated for centuries, instead the are becoming unreliable. In 2019 France had 5580 reactor days with zero production. Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules, OL3 in Finland with a 12 year delay. https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-union https://eu.boell.org/en/2021/04/26/nuclear-power-european-un... You can build a lot of wind and solar parks in that time and updated old one-way dams with pumps to have them a large scale batteries. All that decentralized, thus creating jobs all over the country.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> Regarding new builds in Europe, those still being built are behind schedules Given China appears able to build quality reactors quickly, this would seem to be the result of European policy preferences with respect to nuclear.
- ericd 5y ago
  Not saying they’re not, but I’d be curious what measures of reactor quality you’ve seen?
  - GordonS 5y ago
    Number of severe incidents divided by number of reactor days?
    - rgbrenner 5y ago
      China has the newest plants in the world: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-of-nuclear-power-capacity-in-selected-regions-2019 https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/age-profile-o... We don't know how they'll perform as they age. If we calculated quality as you suggest, they would probably win.. but we would expect brand new plants to have fewer issues than 30 year old plants.

bumby 5y ago

Why wouldn't using hydro to full capacity as part of the base load be a preferred option? Is there less stability in hydroelectric?

lb1lf 5y ago
The good thing about hydro is that, unlike thermal plants, you can regulate power output fast to match demand. Hence, it makes sense to use hydro for handling peaks, not baseline supply.
shagie 5y ago
Hydro has other issues associated with it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-stakes-math-behind-the-wests-greatest-river/?sh=56b6fcb2222b https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonbruner/2011/10/20/the-high-s... Things like "there's more potential available in the spring than in the fall (or winter). > Those margins are doubly difficult to master given the temperamental pulse of a river whose volume increases by a factor of five every spring as snow melts in the Rockies. Within the river’s seasonal changes come manmade fluctuations: every morning its dams awaken the Columbia with surges of water to satisfy the Northwest’s demand for electricity, and every evening the dams tighten their gates to put the river back to sleep. And every other second, an automated system assesses the supply of electricity against demand and makes tiny adjustments to the volume of water moving through each dam’s turbines. Things like drought will also change that capacity of generation. https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-21st-centurys-hoover-dam https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-21st-centurys-hoover-dam Regarding base load - https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/667 https://www.e-education.psu.edu/eme807/node/667 - table 9.1 has the capacity factor. > In the table above, the lower the capacity factor, the more susceptible the system to potential interruptions or drops in performance. We can see that solar and wind technologies, which are notoriously weather-dependent have the lowest CF numbers. At the same time, nuclear power and coal systems are most advantageous when operated continuously and at full load. Nuclear has a capacity factor of 90.3. Hydro is 39.8. Concentrating solar is 33, wind is 20-40 range depending on geography and photovoltaic solar is 15-19. More on that concept - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacity_factor Hydro is the best of the renewable non-fossil fuel base load sources, but it still is poor compared to nuclear and fossil fuel energy generation for base load.

yobbo 5y ago

The problem is that power from wind is random. To match supply=demand, a regulating/controllable power-source like coal/gas/hydro is needed. Because Europe is closing their coal/nuclear plants and hoping to replace them with wind, they end up using Scandinavian hydro-power to match supply/demand. This is currently a catastrophe for Scandinavian prices.

pfdietz 5y ago

> Norway mostly generate electricity from renewable sources, some 99% of our annual production (~120TWh, if memory serves) is hydro-electric. Wind accounted for 6.4% (9.9 TWh) of electric production in Norway in 2020. Total production in Norway in 2020 was 154.2 TWh. https://norwaytoday.info/news/wind-power-production-in-norway-increased-sharply-last-year/ https://norwaytoday.info/news/wind-power-production-in-norwa...

HPsquared 5y ago

I read somewhere that Norway could become Europe's "battery" - the terrain is ideal for building pumped-storage hydro plants, which can store and release electricity to even out the gaps in renewables.

cm2187 5y ago

I am highly skeptical of increasing dependencies between countries on energy when I see this sort of headline: https://news.sky.com/story/france-threatens-to-cut-off-uks-energy-again-in-new-fishing-row-12426857 https://news.sky.com/story/france-threatens-to-cut-off-uks-e...

timeon 5y ago

Not only continental Europe. Connection to UK is not cheap. But this network is not there because they are phasing out some power plants. Import from Norway is relatively small.

eru 5y ago

> We've seen prices becoming more volatile in later years as our domestic market has become more interconnected with that of continental Europe. Differences in prices both between locations and over time can be turned into money. The first with cables, the second with batteries. In the process, the arbitrager smooths out the price differences. Give it a bit of time, and you'll see more stable prices again. (Unless politics throws a spanner in the works, of course.) > It would be nice to serve base power needs by nuclear power, then use hydro (which can be regulated up and down much faster than thermal power plants) to handle the peaks. Oh, and don't forget the ability to regulate demand up and down. Plenty of industrial consumers already have contracts like that, and thanks to 'smart' devices, this technology can come to private consumers as well. Eg assume your short term weather forecasts says that we have plenty of wind now, but there will be a lull in fifteen minutes. So you just tell all the fridges and hot water tanks to cool respectively heat now, so they have some stored thermal energy to get over the lull. Similarly for electric cars charging (you don't even have to take energy out of their batteries back into the grid, it's already useful to be able to suspend their charging for a while and resume later). This is mostly not a problem of high technology, but a problem of coordination. In principle, you also don't need your power company to directly talk to your fridge: whatever controls your home just needs a short term forecast of electricity prices in the next few hours, and can then decide autonomously and in harmony with your preferences.