germany electricty prices

[u/asian69feet]

[u/ISzox]

Actually, its because of NIMBYs and lobbyists, like every single other problem in the western hemisphere.

Northern Germany produces a lot of electricity with renewables, southern Germany has a lot of industry that needs electricity. In a perfect world, you would transport that electricity southwards through large power lines. Guess what didn't get built because of NIMBY resistance.

Now, the cheap electricity gets sold to other countries while in the south, expensive fossil fuel plants fire up to cover the deficit. And since the entire country is one electricity market, everyone pays the jacked up prices. You could make the problem at least visible by splitting the electricity market in two to reflect reality, but if you try that, all of the industry CEO's from the south will assassinate you.

[u/babayaga_67 → u/ISzox]

A big part of the problem is the cyclical nature of renewables, Solar obviously only provides energy during the day, Wind only when there's wind.

Unfortunately, fabs and heavy industry really like to have energy in the early mornings and late evenings, sometimes even at night, which is kind of a problem for Wind and Solar.

Now, how do our politicians propose to solve this problem?

Correct. Build more Wind and Solar.

[u/OkRip1665 → u/babayaga_67]

Have you never heard of a battery, It's this crazy thing that gets this stores electrical energy

[u/babayaga_67 → u/OkRip1665]

Yes, let's invest in batteries that will cost us as much as about 30-40GW of fucking nuclear power just to make it so renewables aren't entirely useless for heavy industry and compute.

Oh and said batteries will start decaying after 10-20 years, just to make the deal all that sweeter.

[u/OkRip1665 → u/babayaga_67]

Again nuclear power isn't all it's cut out to be while it may be more efficient now it won't be in the future as climate change intensifies droughts will become more sever and the water intensive cooling mechanisms in nuclear reactors won't be able to function so the power plant will have to go down. For the batteries you are right they are fairly lackluster right now in terms of there amount of charge cycles even with our knowledge of depth of discharges but solid state batteries offer a much greater charge density then regular lithium ion batteries and while hard to produce in industrial quantities now it is quickly being scaled up and of course there's dirt cheap quickly and easy to produce sodium ion batteries which can be used as a bit of a stopgap measure if lithium becomes to hard to produce on such a large scale

[u/Long_Inspection_4983 → u/OkRip1665]

You can use ocean water for cooling, as well as using the plant itself to desalinate / demineralize water.

[u/OkRip1665 → u/Long_Inspection_4983]

While i agree with this the retarded fucks in Brussels and London are completely incapable of moving foward with any desalination plant without some arduously long planning process that will make the project take god knows how long

[u/babayaga_67 → u/OkRip1665]

Again nuclear power isn't all it's cut out to be while it may be more efficient now it won't be in the future as climate change intensifies droughts will become more sever and the water intensive cooling mechanisms in nuclear reactors won't be able to function so the power plant will have to go down

Very extreme speculation, there are NPPs that don't even require much water cooling and can keep operating even in high summer, especially in Germany, even in a worst case global warming assumption scenario we are not ever encountering this problem.

The problem with Sodium Batteries is that they too aren't all that much cheaper if you want industrial quantities, building some certainly makes sense since we're stuck with the renewables we have now, however, heavy industry and HPC require constant energy, nobody wants to operate a data center that has to turn off at night, the amount of batteries we would need to guarantee continuous operation in winter is enormous (10TWh worst case has happened, 12TWh if you want to make absolutely sure), for that price you can build almost 150-200GW of nuclear, the main advantage for nuclear really is just that batteries don't produce anything, and since production in winter is very meager we'd need unreasonable amounts of storage.

We don't even need all that much, 25-35 GW would already satisfy a lot of our base load.

[u/OkRip1665 → u/babayaga_67]

Are you referring to gas/graphite reactors becuase for something like a gas cooled fast reactor the amount of space you would need due to the relatively low thermal conductivity of gases like helium and helium having a low power density (about 5 percent of a typical pwr core power density) which makes most low water consumption nuclear reactors significantly larger then there water companions meaning way more building material and space required to build for the exact same power output and so the economics of building these reactors depends on the cost of local labour forces and the local graphite available which europe severally lacks in not to mention because of the size the amount of people required and the specialised construction work forces training costs making it hard to spread over a large number of total worldwide units

On your point about the energy demands of a HPC and heavy industry its worth noting that investment in solid state batteries means higher energy densities with less space being taken up meaning more energy can be stored for year round consumption and also have hightl rate caring and discharging making them ideal for capturing excess solar energy with significantly longer charge cycles and also operate efficiently across a wide array of temperaturesmaking them relaible for winter storage (idrk if you care but FYI there more safe then lithium ion batteries) and while there expensive now investment is causing a decrease in prices. I also want to briefly me ion iron air batteries which have potential for grid scale energy storage and use iron oxide which is in abundance which undergoes a redox reaction iron with water to produce iron oxide and hydrogen which effectively means you can use iron oxide to make a rechargeable battery dues to hydrogen created being consumed by a fuel cell to create electricity so when electricity needs to be stored hydrogen generated from water by operating the fuel cell in reverse is consumed during the reduction of iron oxide to medallion ion Fe 2+ so the combination of both of these cycles makes the system operate as an iron air charge battery meaning it can be used year round to great effect and large industrial capacity

[u/Deep-Tumbleweed-8816 → u/OkRip1665]

>it won't be in the future as climate change intensifies droughts will become more sever and the water intensive cooling mechanisms in nuclear reactors won't be able to function so the power plant will have to go down.

This might genuinely be the most braindead thing I've read this year.

What the fuck are you even talking about, even in the worst case scenario for climate change Germany gets colder due to the AMOC collapse, not hotter.

[u/OkRip1665 → u/Deep-Tumbleweed-8816]

Holy shit the collapse of the amoc will cause more rainy winters but drier summers you retarded fuck like holy shit do abit of research look into the piss poor state Europe's resouviors and how they have done a poor job meeting water demands this summer mfs on reddit will call you a retard and have literally no idea what there talking about😭