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‘Honest folk are paying for this’: the fight against Britain’s billion-pound energy heist
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2025
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Oh no. :*(
Renewables correct prices downward from where a fossil-only system would price electricity ...
... so that's the heart of the matter: Russia's actions increasing the price of fossil fuels.
And does that make any sense at all, given Russia's domination of nuclear supply chains? France's nuclear program is mortally dependent on Russian cooperation in a lot of ways too.
Any time right wingers are this adamant at something, someone is probably getting rich on an increase in overall system cost that is then socialized on the backs of genpop.
Meanwhile over here in Germany, the designated chancellor and his "Christian Democrat" party quickly stowed away their pre-election rhetoric about building new nuclear plants/reviving existing plants, after an informal paper from their own party made the rounds, outlining that reviving nuclear in Germany would necessitate massive state aid or even having the state itself run the plants.
But realistically, I think they'd need 2 or 3 times that, right? Afaik, France is currently building just a single domestic plant and they're not exactly executing there. Neither are they executing on the Hinkley Point project. And Olkiluoto was a massive shitshow where French taxpayers financed the 3/4 of the costs that constituted the cost overrun. There are basically two countries that still know how to build nuclear reactors, those are Russia and China, everyone else just incurs perverse cost and build-time overruns. And it does make sense: A centralized, dangerous, expensive technology that works best for centralized, authoritarian regimes that can afford to put all their state power behind these projects. (And yet, China is building out solar/wind much more aggressively than nuclear.)
New nuclear plants are also completely useless against climate change, given their decade/multi-decade build times, especially compared to renewables where plants can be rolled out in a matter of months. Meanwhile, existing French reactors need to be taken offline in summer because their water consumption is woefully ill-adjusted to climate change and they turn France's rivers into bouillabaisse.
Nuclear capacity has been flatlining (at best) for two decades, while renewables have exploded. Even if you assume just 10% utilization for the renewable plants, yesteryear's addition of 6GW nuclear capacity pales in comparison to the 600GWp PV/wind capacity.
Even the author of that study admits to (latently pro-fashy shitrag) NZZ that cheaper batteries would solve the issue. Incidentally, what we've been seeing over the past decade is steadily decreasing battery prices, as scale goes up and cheaper materials substitute more expensive ones.
I don't really want to know what else is wrong with that study of his, given that the largest part of it is concerned with the near-pointless thought experiment of using 100%/95% exclusively solar+batteries. It seems massively more pertinent to worry about the final 10% renewables when the time has come. One major bit that I don't see reflected in the study is flexibilization of demand e.g., which is a thing already. I recently saw a documentary that e.g. included a cold warehouse that could scale up/down its cooling in response to renewables availability. I visited a company producing electric componentry which is doing its electronic component testing on sunny days where they have a lot of solar. I know similar concepts exist for aluminum smelters.
Are there even SMR projects that haven't been cancelled?
They would, if they weren't four times more expensive than nuclear, and 13 times more expensive than gas.
It's certainly one of the issues, but not the only issue. The gas price is close to historical averages now, yet UK electricity prices remain very high.
Russia controls approximately 22% of the world’s uranium conversion capacity and 44% of its enrichment capacity. This is hardly insurmountable. It should spur investment from other nations. China accounts for approximately 70–90% of the global market across all stages of the lithium-ion battery value chain. Does that mean the world should give up on EVs and battery storage? Surely not.
I don't know what you mean by "stowed away," but their policy shows they are still very much open to nuclear energy.
France definitely doesn't need 2-3 times that based on current implementation of renewables.
You won't catch me defending the speed of large reactor roll-outs. Despite this, and the high costs, it's still much cheaper than renewables. SMRs will be much faster to deploy, much more flexible, much cheaper, and require much less planning.
China is also building two "mega" coal lignite power plants per week. I don't think we should use them as a role model.
CO2 production is expected to continue to climb for 50-100 years, and we won't reach CO2 neutrality for hundreds of years, if ever. A 7-10 year timespan is very little compared to the enormous environmental benefits.
This is a political decision, not one based in science or finance. Despite renewables being far from ready to replace Germany's nuclear generation, the public voted to switch to much more environmentally damaging gas generation. That gas was primarily coming from a hostile, authoritarian nation. The public voted to place the economic prosperity of Germany in the hands of Russia. It was one of the most tragic examples of democratic self immolation in all of history.
And I fully agree with the author. In 30-50 years when battery technology becomes cost effective at grid scale, we'll be having a very different discussion.
That's fair. It expands on the even more flawed LCOE metric which is widely (and incorrectly) used to compare wind/solar with nuclear/gas/coal.
Rolls Royce isn't due to deliver commercial SMRs until the early 2030s. Until then designs are either bespoke (and expensive, and untested), or using the GE Hitachi BWRX-300, which is also very expensive because it's only licensed, and built on site to spec. It has many of the same issues as traditional large reactors. GE began licensing that design in 2020, and the most advanced project is I think in Canada, due to be completed in 2028. Once RR figures out their production lines, I think we see huge efficiencies of scale and much easier planning.
So you're taking (probably skewed against renewables) numbers from the paper that is concerned with a pure solar/wind/battery grid and apply them to today's mixed grid? That seems ... wrong. Especially as operators can afford to price PV power at .04€/kWh.
At least in Germany, gas used to be priced at .06€/kWh, now it's somewhere above .10€/kWh... and that's before it's turned into .20+€/kWh electricity.
For one, Rosatom is fairly aggressive in taking over the industry and building the same kinds of lasting relationships as with gas/oil. For two, it is really helpful to European nuclear nations to have a proxy who extracts/buries stuff from/in remote places where environmental damage does not matter. If there was a European supply chain, mining like in Kazakhstan and landfilling like in Siberia is out, and that's probably a major obstacle, even for France with its post-colonial ties to Africa.
A big part of the issue is that fission is a dead horse and people are still marketing concepts that failed in the 70s.
You linked to their election program. Anyone who cared a bit knew before the election that they definitely would not revive the old nuclear plants, i.e. this was a fairly transparent lie. Gonservatives cleverly waited until after the election to announce that however: They went silent on the topic, then shortly floated the idea of the state taking over nuclear plants and then buried the idea overall, leaving only a mention of fusion research in the final coalition treaty.
Ah well, renewables save the day, I guess; despite Macron's wishes to the contrary. :)
Since EPRs don't store heat like Terrapower's SMR designs did, i.e. they are unable to properly modulate output, they still won't work particularly well in conjunction with renewables though ...
That seems like a big [citation needed] because mass-produced SMRs still appear to be a pipe dream.
I am not using China as a role model. I am saying that they probably did some calculations before they came up with the strategy of building a lot of renewables (+ coal), rather than building a lot of nuclear plants. Their actual coal use is going down which indicates that the new coal plants are more or less peaker plants (inasmuch as that's possible with coal).
Besides you calculating build times that don't line up with any of the recent nuclear builds in the EU--you do realize that we don't have that time, right? Given the current rate of climate change and biodiversity loss, if we don't get a handle on emissions and destruction of nature, we likely only have 15 to 30 years before humanity sinks into complete chaos. There are reasons Zuck and Spez and others bought bunkers. There are reasons why Peter Thiel and ilk really want to tear down organized society and kill most of us right now.
If CO2 emissions are still increasing in 50 years, that won't be from direct human actions but rather from knock-on effects like unfreezing tundra and dying rainforests. Because humans are likely dead at that point.
Not sure in what sense this is supposed to be true...
In 2000, when the EEG (i.e. the German renewables law) was enacted, it's true, solar and wind power were indeed much less competitive. But this was a calculated bet: PV was space-station technology and prices could be brought down through mass production and automation; wind power had been pioneered by Denmark and was already on a good path. At the same time, it would allow building new industries. And that did work, at least until China made a much larger bet on the same tech and gonservatives helped the German renewables industries die, in favor of coal and gas. This was designed as a multi-decade process, not as a turnkey solution.
It's rarely the public that votes on any particular issue in a representative democracy. Not sure why you're phrasing it that way, twice even--perhaps to suggest irrationality?
"Switch to" is a weird phrasing for what actually happened, namely the German government agreeing to phase-out of nuclear and, independently, deepening its gas-import dependence on Russia. Notably, most of that gas is used for heating or in the chemical industry anyway, not to generate electricity. The relationship with Russia is a long-standing one, even West Germany imported gas from the Soviet Union in the 80s.
Russia was not perceived as all that hostile toward Europe in the early 2000s. Around 2010 was the time that some people started to feel more uneasy. The mainstream didn't notice much until 2022, however.
That seems like an exaggeration. Especially given that fact that you don't seem to care about nuclear ties to Russia at all. Yeah, it was stupid and preventable but ultimately not back-breaking, at least not to Germany.
German gas consumption has gone down dramatically since 2022, despite there only being a light recession (i.e. production is similar while gas use is down a third or so). The size of the dependency built up is no wonder either: German consumers were needlessly incentivized financially to buy new gas boilers until August 2022; industry was told to go with gas for all their processes. Not only did people buy into the hype but they were fairly inefficient in their gas use too. (And now that gonservatives are back in the saddle, of course, they're eyeing Russian gas imports again. Whodathunk.)
Now France is in the same boat there, given its reliance on Rosatom (and even on Russian gas deliveries)--and they're not even doing anything to stop that. Germany's switch to predominantly Norwegian and Dutch gas and some LNG was costly in the short term but appears to have been comparatively easier than e.g. France unbundling Framatome from its Russian dependencies. (Russian gas is not completely gone in Germany but it's now somewhere around 10% rather than hovering around 50%.)
The author talks about a 2030 timeframe but ok ...
Apparently though, the economics are very much in favor of battery storage already. The connection requests for large battery storage in Germany last year already beat Bloomberg's worldwide prediction for 2030.
storage requests Germany