Comment by jakobnissen
8 hours ago
Denmark is not a good model to understand what China can do, because we are a small country who can import a big share of our electricity from abroad when it’s not windy, and export excess capacity when it is. It will be much more challenging for China to achieve what we have done.
Put more directly, our numbers look good because Norwegian hydro and Swedish nuclear saves our bacon when our windmills don’t work; China does not have that luxury.
China has those luxuries .. with a land area some what larger than Denmark, Norway, and Sweden combined it has areas in sunlight when others are dark, areas that are windy when others are not, large hydro schemes internally, a good number of nuclear plants to draw from and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing build out of HVDC transmission lines across long distances and the means to keep building battery farms.
Sure, but their energy budget includes everything. They don’t have the luxury of importing energy others invested into decades ago when convenient and having it be off balance sheet like Denmark does.
China would actually have to build stuff to do that. Denmark can just pretend it doesn’t exist.
> China would actually have to build stuff to do that.
and they do. Unlike Denmark, China is the world's factory and can use the windfall from exports to fund projects and have them on its balance sheet.
China is large and increasingly has the build their transmission capacity to allow them to move electricity around within China.
Denmark's power generation from wind is around 20TWh/year, Norway hydro 140 TWh/year, and Swedish nuclear 50 TWh/year.
China's wind power is at 1,000TWh/year, hydro 1,500 TWh/year, nuclear 326 TWh/year.
(Stats mostly from statbase.org which is a couple years out of date.)
So on the one hand, it's less likely that all of the wind power in China will lull at the same time. Then on the other hand, their hydro and nuclear can't absorb nearly as much % fluctuation. Maybe they could make up the difference with batteries though.
The Chinese strategy right now is to just massively overbuild renewables so that even fallow periods generate a substantial amount of energy.
China's power generation is still >50% coal, so I don't know if I would call renewables "overbuilt" yet.
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The Swedish nuclear can’t do much since it doesn’t adapt to the load generally. Except turning off when prices are too low for too long. And recently the reliability has been awful.
It does help a bit with other consumers feeling the price differences and turning down their consumption though.
Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish hydro are doing the heavy lifting.
But Denmark also has enough thermal generation, mostly biofuels, to do without imports. But imported hydro is of course far cheaper.
The benefit of nuclear here is that its output doesn't correlate with the others. If you have 1/3 nuclear and 2/3 solar but solar output is at 50% of normal then total output is at 2/3 of normal instead of 1/2. It leaves you that much less to have to make up with peaker plants and demand-based pricing. It also leaves you with that much less need for battery storage at night.
The problem with that is all consumers ask themselves why they should pay for expensive nuclear electricity when renewables or stored renewables deliver.
We are already seeing coal plants add storage since they can’t cope with the grid demands, to squeeze a few extra years out of their legacy plants. Thats where nuclear is headed.
And nuclear doesn’t really help with cold spells, huge aircon loads or other strained situations.
Nuclear just pushes up the bottom, leaving everyone else to still solve the hard part.
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> Except turning off when prices are too low for too long
Even that is unlikely. Most nuclear power plants operate with a "strike price": they negotiate a fixed price, and the government makes up the difference between that fixed price and the actual market price.
For example, Hinkley Point C in the UK has negotiated a strike price of about €160/MWh. When the market trades at €100/MWh, the taxpayers will pay them an additional €60/MWh for every unit they produce. To make it even worse: the contract is for every unit they could produce. If the reactor is technically able to generate power but the grid operator, for whatever reason, decides to source it elsewhere, the taxpayers are still on the hook for €160/MWh for every MWh the reactor could've generated but didn't.
The result of this is that reactors aren't turned off when the prices go low and will always be the last to get throttled down. Low grid demand? The expensive reactor will keep running at full blast, it'll be the dirt-cheap solar which gets turned off.
This is why building new nuclear is such a horrible idea from an economic perspective: you are essentially locking in those high power prices for the next ~60 years, no matter what happens. Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
> Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market, don't come begging the government for a giant guaranteed-profit handout.
Guess you just explained how one investor was convinced: the government.
Why? Because governments don't think in quarterly reports and short term profits, but also have to make strategic investments in stability. Ignoring the existence of baseload power needs is classical fallacy of "solar-pilled" westerners with the luxury of having 24/7 power from sources they are willing to ignore. I'm saying this with solar panels on top the house I'm living, and charging an electric car from them.
Solar and wind are not a panacea, and batteries won't solve all power needs, it is the same mindset as outsourcing polluting and humanely taxing industries to China or the third world and acting if we solved environmental or ethics problems, because we can now conveniently nott see them.
If we stop our industry, and civil infrastructure for the night, sure, no need for baseload, just some batteries... wish nobody wants to make a tea, make food, smelt aluminum at night...
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> Want to build additional nuclear? First convince an investor to take the risk and operate on the free market
That's a bit cruel, because no such nuclear plant has ever been built and operated, anywhere in the world. :)
> Someone could invent a magical zero-point energy warp drive and provide us with unlimited free power, and we'd still be paying for those nuclear power plants!
yes, if magic unlimited free power arrives nuclear will turn out useless
if it will not, then it provides some stability to energy grid and ensures that low polluting, resilient source of power exists
somehow I think that risk of magic unlimited free power appearing is low - and if it appears, then costs of contracted power will be now negligible
personally I prefer to pay a bit more for reduced risk of blackouts
That’s for new nuclear. Existing nuclear reactors operate on the whim of the markets.
For that we have energy futures, or just bidding negative, if you don’t want to turn off. But anyone buying the electricity will ask themselves why they should pay a premium for nuclear electricity at the height of summer when the continent is flooded with solar
Here’s an article in Swedish how a reactor was turned off for about a week due to consistently low prices. While another reactor at the same plant was already having maintenance done.
https://www.nyteknik.se/energi/forsmark-2-ur-drift-pa-agarna...
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If Sweden can build nuclear, why can't China?
China has 38 reactors under construction and are leaders in advanced designs.
The main issue is that China is really big (emits around three times as much total CO2 as the US), so "38 reactors" sounds like a lot but meanwhile they're operating >1000 coal power plants.
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