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The curtailment happens almost every summer now. But my understanding is that this is about environmental regulations that prevent power plants from heating th

The curtailment happens almost every summer now. But my understanding is that this is about environmental regulations that prevent power plants from heating the river water by too much. The plant itself would be able to run totally fine with the current water temperature, but it would raise the temperature beyond what environmental regulations allow. Instead, Europe is now burning Coal and Lignite. Which of course is much worse for the water temperature in the long run…

pjc50 4y ago
France has almost no coal left. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power-station-closure-174891 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power... Germany is the one that's closing reactors, over post-Chernobyl/Fukushima fears, and burning coal instead. It also has a surprisingly powerful coal lobby.
- atdrummond 4y ago
  Isn’t that lobby a remanent of the large East German coal industry? I’m thinking of eg. Lusatia’s coal belt.
  - yayachiken 4y ago
    The big energy suppliers burning coal all sit in Northrhine-Westfalia, the most populous state in Germany. Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time. While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume. Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
    - willyt 4y ago
      Interesting. Parts of Britain were very similar. Things like every mine union chapter had its own brass band and the mine unions took great pride in thier traditions and thier local communities. Basically it’s neglected miners and steelworkers and other closed down heavy industries in the north of England that voted for Brexit just to pull the rug out from under everyone else because they were thrown on the scrap heap by Thatcher in the 1980’s and those areas never recovered. The liberal voting cities told the mining folk they were idiots for voting for brexit and so they switched allegiances from Labour (closely linked to the unions) to the Conservatives who were telling these people they were going to fix things for them, ‘levelling up’ the North of England. This hasn’t happened there is not even a coherent plan for how it could happen and the new candidates for prime minister are all going on about how they’re going to be more like Thatcher than the others, forgetting that the people who just switched to them hated her for destroying thier way of life. So be careful! Don’t disrespect the miners they will cause chaos if you annoy them!!
- konschubert 4y ago
  Germany is burning more coal and gas to cover for French power shortages. The grids are interconnected. There is a European power market.
  - Glawen 4y ago
    This argument makes no sense, do you have number? The French reactors are shut down in summer because there is less electricity demand and you have an abundance of solar power. Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. So I don't get how Germany would need to burn coal/gas for the french. If I look here, only 2% are imported from Germany https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electricitymap.org&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electrici... The real problem is going to be this winter, where EDF needs to repair its nuclear reactors before the start of winter, in order to provide electricity for France and Germany. And that situation is pretty much due to the lack of vision of Germany and Merkel.
    - yayachiken 4y ago
      If you understand German, there is a great explanation how the energy market in Europe works here: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wieso-kraftwerksbetreiber-gerade-kein-gas-sparen/das-erste/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL3BsdXNtaW51cy81ZWI1NGFlZi1mNTYwLTRhOTYtYTFhZC02ZmJjZjc3ZmY4MWE https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wie... It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices. The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again. Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water). On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached. Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh. Also: > Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically. And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off. Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
- wewxjfq 4y ago
  > France has almost no coal left And also has to keep it running now. > Germany is the one that's closing reactors Three reactors while France has half of theirs offline. The irony is that if Germany is going to extend their NPP, it will be because the next German stress test runs under the assumption of a major French power plant outage. I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
  - Semaphor 4y ago
    > I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure. All the experts on HN and Reddit already switched from "France is amazing, Germany dumb" to "The French are idiots for not having invested into nuclear power. Germany still dumb."
    - mgoetzke 4y ago
      The idiocy is not investing into Wind/Solar/Storage
b3orn 4y ago
Coal power plants have the same cooling problem as nuclear power plants. And looking at some rivers in Europe at the moment the problem with power plants using water for cooling isn't just heating up rivers too much, the water levels are dangerously low to the point of some rivers almost disappearing, there are some famous examples of that in Italy this year.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  We'll have on in NL as well, either this year or maybe the next but it is very close to that point.
  - konschubert 4y ago
    A curtailment or a dry river?
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Dry river: https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/pho...
      - konschubert 4y ago
        If the Rhine falling dry doesn't wake up the Germans then nothing will...
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Indeed. It's beyond my level of understanding, as long as I've been alive this has not happened, though I understand that historically it has happened, and whenever it did it was followed by at least one year of famine.
- yayachiken 4y ago
  At least in Germany, lignite plants are operating on locally mined lignite, which means there is a big open-pit mine directly next to the plant. This means that the water table needs to be drained to keep the mine dry. The pumps in many cases directly feed the excess water into the power plant. An example is the plant Neurath, which is the second biggest coal power plant in Europe, delivering 4 gigawatts of power without use of surface water.

pjc50 4y ago

France has almost no coal left. https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power-station-closure-174891 https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/france-rethinks-coal-power... Germany is the one that's closing reactors, over post-Chernobyl/Fukushima fears, and burning coal instead. It also has a surprisingly powerful coal lobby.

atdrummond 4y ago
Isn’t that lobby a remanent of the large East German coal industry? I’m thinking of eg. Lusatia’s coal belt.
- yayachiken 4y ago
  The big energy suppliers burning coal all sit in Northrhine-Westfalia, the most populous state in Germany. Migrating away from (black) coal (used mostly in the steel industry) has caused big issues in the Ruhr area ("Strukturwandel", structural shift, meaning migration of significant parts of the workforce from coal to other sectors) in the past, which also means that the population is very wary of phasing out lignite as well. Pretty much everyone knows somebody who lost their job in a mine. Some cities like Gelsenkirchen are still structurally weak, like a lite version of Detroit. This means that politicians mow give expensive political gifts to the coal industry to provide retraining opportunities or early pensions, just so they can claim that they do not "forget" the workers this time. While in fact, there is maybe 30k people or so in all of Germany employed by coal and its dependent industries. And nobody cares that the wind and solar industry lost 100k or so workers over the last decade due to avoidable regulatory issues and the resulting low project volume. Anyways, you should not underestimate the amount of respect the coal workers always had in the Ruhr area. Digging coal in a below-ground mine is still the essential definition of "honest work" and sacrifice here. It's probably somewhat comparable to how military service is treated in the US, including the occasional "thank you for your service" and all. There are shrines dedicated to St. Barbara, the patron saint of mining, sprinkled everywhere, because people regularily prayed for their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and friends to come home safely each day. Children learn the Steigerlied in school and sing it before football games. It's even worse than a lobby, the population mostly supports special treatment for the coal workers, as the mining and steel industry is still part of the cultural DNA.
  - willyt 4y ago
    Interesting. Parts of Britain were very similar. Things like every mine union chapter had its own brass band and the mine unions took great pride in thier traditions and thier local communities. Basically it’s neglected miners and steelworkers and other closed down heavy industries in the north of England that voted for Brexit just to pull the rug out from under everyone else because they were thrown on the scrap heap by Thatcher in the 1980’s and those areas never recovered. The liberal voting cities told the mining folk they were idiots for voting for brexit and so they switched allegiances from Labour (closely linked to the unions) to the Conservatives who were telling these people they were going to fix things for them, ‘levelling up’ the North of England. This hasn’t happened there is not even a coherent plan for how it could happen and the new candidates for prime minister are all going on about how they’re going to be more like Thatcher than the others, forgetting that the people who just switched to them hated her for destroying thier way of life. So be careful! Don’t disrespect the miners they will cause chaos if you annoy them!!
konschubert 4y ago
Germany is burning more coal and gas to cover for French power shortages. The grids are interconnected. There is a European power market.
- Glawen 4y ago
  This argument makes no sense, do you have number? The French reactors are shut down in summer because there is less electricity demand and you have an abundance of solar power. Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. So I don't get how Germany would need to burn coal/gas for the french. If I look here, only 2% are imported from Germany https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electricitymap.org&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/FR?utm_source=electrici... The real problem is going to be this winter, where EDF needs to repair its nuclear reactors before the start of winter, in order to provide electricity for France and Germany. And that situation is pretty much due to the lack of vision of Germany and Merkel.
  - yayachiken 4y ago
    If you understand German, there is a great explanation how the energy market in Europe works here: https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wieso-kraftwerksbetreiber-gerade-kein-gas-sparen/das-erste/Y3JpZDovL2Rhc2Vyc3RlLmRlL3BsdXNtaW51cy81ZWI1NGFlZi1mNTYwLTRhOTYtYTFhZC02ZmJjZjc3ZmY4MWE https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/plusminus/teurer-strom-wie... It explains why currently, even though gas is so prohibitively expensive, we still run gas powered plants at the moment, and also why even with relatively low transmission capacity between countries there is still big impact on energy prices. The tl;dr is: Energy prices are determined by taking the most expensive auction price that is required to cover the load at any given moment. Everyone who offered a cheaper rate may sell the energy, but receives the highest price that was accepted. This means that prices are highly non-linear and susceptible to supply shocks. Even though the changes from import to export with respect to France are small, a rather small reduction in cheap nuclear power immediately makes it a lot more profitable to produce energy, also making coal and gas viable again. Also note that this model explains the cheap price of nuclear and solar: You "only" need to ROI your initial capital eventually to turn a profit. When push comes to shove you would rather sell at any price above 0 (or at least a very low bottom) rather than turning off your plant and getting no income at all. You cannot do that when you still have significant operational expenses for fuel (coal, gas, stored water). On electricitymap you can see this behaviour in action as well. Even with something like 50% solar production, prices remain high, when suddenly, the prices collapse below zero after a certain threshold was reached. Also note that in these cases, the prices in France and Germany decouple. Customers on the German energy exchange might get paid to use energy while in France spot price still is upward of 10-20 ct/kWh. Also: > Under European market law, you are obliged to buy renewable energy if it is available. Do you have a source for that? I think that guarantee only applies to Germany. And then it only says that the suppliers always get paid for the energy they could produce, wind and solar can and will still get turned off physically. And from what I have written above it pretty much follows that renewables will always be bought if possible, because they have no fuel costs and letting them run is during positive prices always more profitable than shutting them off. Note though that many renewables are not even sold on the energy exchange and rather influence the market indirectly as most energy utilities have fixed delivery contracts with the producers and only buy/sell the excess on the spot market.
wewxjfq 4y ago
> France has almost no coal left And also has to keep it running now. > Germany is the one that's closing reactors Three reactors while France has half of theirs offline. The irony is that if Germany is going to extend their NPP, it will be because the next German stress test runs under the assumption of a major French power plant outage. I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  > I can only already see the jubilant HN threads how this is a win for NP, when it's actually a testimony of its failure. All the experts on HN and Reddit already switched from "France is amazing, Germany dumb" to "The French are idiots for not having invested into nuclear power. Germany still dumb."
  - mgoetzke 4y ago
    The idiocy is not investing into Wind/Solar/Storage

b3orn 4y ago

Coal power plants have the same cooling problem as nuclear power plants. And looking at some rivers in Europe at the moment the problem with power plants using water for cooling isn't just heating up rivers too much, the water levels are dangerously low to the point of some rivers almost disappearing, there are some famous examples of that in Italy this year.

jacquesm 4y ago
We'll have on in NL as well, either this year or maybe the next but it is very close to that point.
- konschubert 4y ago
  A curtailment or a dry river?
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Dry river: https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/photo/1 https://twitter.com/jmattheij/status/1550847204671295489/pho...
    - konschubert 4y ago
      If the Rhine falling dry doesn't wake up the Germans then nothing will...
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        Indeed. It's beyond my level of understanding, as long as I've been alive this has not happened, though I understand that historically it has happened, and whenever it did it was followed by at least one year of famine.
yayachiken 4y ago
At least in Germany, lignite plants are operating on locally mined lignite, which means there is a big open-pit mine directly next to the plant. This means that the water table needs to be drained to keep the mine dry. The pumps in many cases directly feed the excess water into the power plant. An example is the plant Neurath, which is the second biggest coal power plant in Europe, delivering 4 gigawatts of power without use of surface water.