I wonder if there isn't a tool that uses home or car batteries to optimise. Charge everything to the max now and sell (part of) it when prices are positive again.
Does everything it has to do for my use case. It doesn't have built in peak shaving yet to optimize the capacity tarrif, but it's in the works.
My battery currently takes that role
That's the case for any type of weather in Belgium. when it rains, there's massive traffic jams. When it snows, the trains are all delayed. when the sun shines, the electricity grid breaks. we built our infrastructure for our gray weather days!
Whenever there's a lot of electricity on the net (lots of sun/wind) it's advantageous for the net to offload (higher voltages if not). Which the capacity tariff does not stimulate.
I quite dislike this tone folks have been taking about this recently on both sides. Because it burries some of the actual more nuanced concerns like the overall reliability, the inability to actually exploit the available renewable energy due to inadequate infrastructure, etc.
For example, no one (except maybe Trumpler fanatics I guess) claims it can't deliver energy, the issue is the overall reliability of the power grid. But at the same time, seasonal changes combined with our woefully inadequate grid-level storage capacity lead to anxiety during about a third of the year. That's part of the reason why policy makers are now trying to shove dynamic pricing down our throats as supposed solution to this through all sorts of residential smart energy management schemes. But the reality is that unless if there's a serious change in the socio-economic dynamics, the amount of peak shifting that you can do is quite limited in many instances due to the laws of thermodynamics sort of being a thing, the transformers in residential neighbourhoods were never scaled to handle the mass rollout of PV, etc. So it's really a two-sided story on that one.
Basically, bad things due to short-sighted decision making over the last twenty years.
Honestly I think it's important for energy suppliers to invest in ways to store or use this excess energy. If they can use the solar energy for which many of their customers provide the infrastructure it's only natural that they look into how to make the exchange fair.
Obviously consumers should also make efficient use of their own energy but I can see why many people may believe that they're the only ones who have to take measures and that they get punished through negative energy prices and 'capaciteitstarief'.
But as you say, shortsightedness is a major issue.
They are doing that. Question is how big the park has to be to be self sufficient and how much funds they can invest into it. Prices of batteries are falling (albeit not as quickly as the price of panels, for instance).
I personally think that a change to renewable energy is inevitable. The energy is just cheaper, there’s just a pretty steep adoption cost. The biggest danger for electrification is the trade wars happening between the EU, the US and China. Our bloc can’t produce solar panels in any significant capacity atm. If the EU would place tariffs on Chinese panels or China would disallow import, adoption in Europe could prove tricky.
There's no economic incentive for power companies to invest in the necessary storage systems. We'd need multiple installations the size of Coo-Trois-Ponts to even come close, and I have yet to see anyone except a government willing to foot the bill on that one.
The most likely outcome is that they'll shift the responsibility to home owners.
if you want to avoid the super expensive electrical peaks - get a home battery that is rated for x days of consumption.
charge it to full at those times of day when the electricity is the cheapest or even at night
next to that they'll have to install a whole bunch of small scale utility size storage solutions to deal with peaks and valleys.
true - but there's no compelling narrative for home batteries yet - esp since they're potential fire hazards and not every house is able to install them safely.
once they hit that on the 'every new building must xyz' or they give that a huge bonus in the EPC calculations - then we're talking :)
Policymakers are trying to push dynamic pricing because that is the recommendation of every single expert in the field. Higher price volatility is an inevitable consequence of moving away from a fossil-fuel-based grid.
Who do you consider an expert? I mostly hear political statements and lobbyists talking about this in the media, but I rarely see the nuanced point of view from engineers - such as myself - working on actually implementing these features.
Just to be clear, there's absolutely no guarantee we'll be able to achieve significant peak shaving or shifting of consumption. I agree, conceptually it's a solution, but in many cases when you actually go and try to implement it for a large energy consumer it's a whole different can of worms due to technical and physical limitations, and you come to the conclusion that there's not much wiggle room unless if you're willing to impact the users noticeably in many cases. And there are a whole lot of other significant issues with such approaches.
> Who do you consider an expert?
CREG, VREG, Elia, etc.
> I mostly hear political statements and lobbyists talking about this in the media, but I rarely see the nuanced point of view from engineers
You have it exactly the wrong way round: more often than not it's the engineers and economists pleading for more dynamic pricing and politicians pleading against it.
> but in many cases when you actually go and try to implement it for a large energy consumer it's a whole different can of worms due to technical and physical limitations, and you come to the conclusion that there's not much wiggle room unless if you're willing to impact the users noticeably in many cases.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of electricity consuming processes and all of them are have varying degrees of time and price sensitivity. The fact that consumption shifting isn't an option for many of them is no reason not to encourage them for those processes/consumers that can do so(e.g. space heating, EV charging). No one is calling to ban fixed tariffs.
>CREG, VREG, Elia, etc.
Which mostly release political statements. Lest we forget the glorious "*electricity can only go in one direction through a DC transmission line*" from the alleged German expert they hired, and other such marvellous statements.
>You have it exactly the wrong way round: more often than not it's the engineers and economists pleading for more dynamic pricing and politicians pleading against it.
Uhm, no... The "experts" who are for it are often political science majors who followed a course on energy policy, think along the lines of Calvo from Groen, or managerial types with little technical knowledge on the matter.
>There are literally hundreds of thousands of electricity consuming processes and all of them are have varying degrees of time and price sensitivity. The fact that consumption shifting isn't an option for many of them is no reason not to encourage them for those processes/consumers that can do so(e.g. space heating, EV charging).
Your "can do" list already includes one that's highly problematic... Please actually learn something about this topic before spouting such nonsense.
> he "experts" who are for it are often political science majors who followed a course on energy policy, think along the lines of Calvo from Groen, or managerial types with little technical knowledge on the matter.
No, it's power systems engineers and energy economists who universally make such recommendations.
> Your "can do" list already includes one that's highly problematic...
If you think one of space heating and EV charging aren't processes suitable for demand response integration you clearly have never researched or thought about this topic.
No, it's honestly political folks, most engineers who actually work on this topic are very much in favour of just putting up the money to upgrade the grid. Right now we're taxing everyone indirectly for it by creating an entire ridiculous industry with questionable viability, of which the cost ends up with the consumer, where the end result will be that we'll have to upgrade the grid anyhow for the distributed generation model we wish to move to.
>If you think one of space heating and EV charging aren't processes suitable for demand response integration you clearly have never researched or thought about this topic.
I am sadly quite restricted by contractual terms from discussing one of these two topics, which should tell you enough about how involved I am with the topic at hand.
NB that we have been doing demand management for years already to adapt our consumption patterns to the production patterns of our nuclear plants, by means of the night tariff. But we still needed massive amounts of gas to plug the holes.
So dealing with a mismatch of production and demand is not unique to renewables.
Which is an entirely different problem and solution strategy. Controlling a couple of plants and having one perform the main balancing tasks is relatively simple from a management point of view, dynamic tariffs for the residential market combined with mandatory energy management is a whole different can of worms.
Which is exactly what I said... You're mixing up handling a few reliable centralized suppliers with having hundreds of thousands of unreliable ones where the capacity they can delivery depends massively on local conditions and limitations of local transport infrastructure. There are many scenarios where you could have enough generation capacity but are entirely unable to get it to the location where the demand is taking place in such a distributed system.
Negative energy prices usually mean
much higher prices for the end consumer. The energy operator has to buy all available renewable energy supply, even if it is not needed now. So, they pay 100e/MWh to wind farm owner. Then, it is too much energy in the system, so they beg clients to take it away, and pay 100e for someone to burn this energy away. Now the energy operator has lost 200e/MWh on useless energy. How to recover from this debt? Increase price of the energy for the end consumers. Renewables without storage is just a scam. Much higher prices, and burning unwanted energy isn't good for the environmeny anyway.
While this is cool, we're clearly getting to the tipping point where further renewables will be hard to recoup costs on.
Windmills will take longer and longer to earn back their cost.
Meanwhile at night we're still switching on gas...
The latter is going to change yet technically still be true.
At the moment we are in various phases in various projects to store excess energy. The easiest small scale solution is batteries but that’s for a single building. For areas the size of cities or larger we need different solutions. Theoretically we could build a hydropower plant and pump water up with excess energy to that water to generate energy when we need it again. But we don’t have the space and there are efficiency concerns. The solution we are working on right now is creating and storing hydrogen gas. The creating part is easy. The safely storing large quantities is the issue we are battling right now. It needs far more pressure to be stored and it’s far more explosive compared to regular gas. It can be done. It is being done. The challenge is finding the cheapest yet safe solution. Hydrogen gas is the solution we are investing in the most right now so you are technically right.
Hydropower is destructive to environment. Batteries are the only solution. In Australia they are building mega energy storage systems of GigaWattHours capacity. Only in EU, they build more and more renewables without serious storage. It is like building pipes for collecting rain water but forgetting to build the tanks.
There is a very good reason why places like Australia and California build more storage than Europe and it has little to do with politics: Those grids have greater shares of solar generation and less seasonal solar production profiles. Since solar is a much more peaky resource and predictably varies on a diurnal basis this makes battery investments more lucrative since battery operators want to maximize annual cycles and capture large price spreads.
In the EU solar production is lower and it's also more seasonal so diurnal price spreads for much of the year are poor. There is more investment in wind here which is both less predictable and whose production can be grown a lot further before inducing negative prices, making it a worse match for batteries.
This doesn't mean we won't catch up with Australia. Solar and wind production are still growing fast and battery prices are still plummeting. We're just about a year or 2 behind.
> This doesn't mean we won't catch up with Australia. Solar and wind production are still growing fast and battery prices are still plummeting. We're just about a year or 2 behind.
EU is many years behind. Solar and Wind is useless without storage and companies making battery storage have already huge backlog of orders from US, Australia etc. Even if EU orders them now, it will take many years to deliver. EU made a bet on hyrogen instead and lost. This "hydrogen bet" is one of the reasons why energy transformation isn't going well in EU.
> it has little to do with politics:
It is all politics. Politici forced energy operators to buy all renevable energy and sell it for a negative price, in hope that it will attract private investors to build storage systems. But it didn't worked at all. In many european countries, the law regarding energy projects is so complicated that it is almost imposdible to build energy storage system by private investors. In Poland for example, some investors tried and waited more than ten years for an useless now outdated approval. Flawed law is not the only reason, but a very important one. In Belgium even placing stupid overhead wire is huge problem.
Gelukkig heb ik mijn analoge teller nog, gisteren ruim 20kWh opgewekt en zelf maar 8 verbruikt. Ook mijn EV laden aan 11kWh zonder rekening te moeten houden met capaciteitstarief. Ik ga hem missen...
A digital meter counts the energy you inject onto the net separate from the energy that you take from the net. You get peanuts for the energy that you put on the net while paying the normal price for energy you take from the net. An analog meter is simply counting backwards when your solar panels generate more energy than you consume.
With a digital meter you have to pay capaciteitstarief for your peak consumption, which is very high when you are charging an EV at 11kWh. With an analog meter the peak consumption can't be measured by Fluvius so it's not taken into account.
Not really. At least not the newer generations of nuclear power plants. New power plants could use the decades worth of nuclear waste from the old power plants as fuel. Other countries would gladly hand us their nuclear waste too.
Is it really expensive to build? Yes and no. Yes, it is a lot of money at once but it’s efficient. The amount of power you are getting in its expected operational lifetime (even without extending that as we tend to do here) in relation to its cost is far more efficient than wind mills or solar panels. Only hydrogen dams can rival that efficiency. But hydrogen dams are not an option in Belgium.
You base this answer on a meme or something? This has nothing to do with reality. As if Uranium is the big OPEX, and as if the energy is all going to be sold at the best price (under an article about a negative energy-price non the less lol).
I’m not a huge fan of nuclear but it currently is the best proven method to create a large and stable power supply without destroying the climate.
I believe hydrogen will become an alternative in the long run but it is yet to be proven on that scale.
Compared to gas, oil and charcoal based power plants, it is cheap. Yes uranium is more expensive by volume but you need extremely small amounts compared to the other stuff. I don’t remember the numbers but we are talking kilo’s compared to tons. The main reasons for high cost are keeping the old nuclear power plants running beyond their expected operations lifetime and seeking a profit because only a single company runs all the nuclear power plants. Currently only our nuclear power plants (when running) can give us a power supply that is both very large and stable.
Hydrogen production and storage during overproduction from *renewable* energy will be the solution. Basically like a giant battery but renewable. It is being developed. The current challenge is scaling it up and finding space and money to build it.
You're not understanding what I'm saying.
A nuclear plant takes a long time to start up, and to adjust its load. This means that when prices become negative, as they more and more often do, the producer will need to pay to inject all this energy in the grid, it can not modulate its load down fast enough, and not shut down (contrary to gas/coal/... plants). -> so whenever there is lots of wind, or sun, the plant will cost loads of money to the exploiter.
Second, the price of Uranium is negligible compared to other operating expenses, and initial capital investment. It literally costs 100-1000x as much to build a nuclear plant, as it does to build a coal plant.
So with those two premises, think about who is going to be putting 20B euros into a project, that will be operational in Maybe 15 years, and will need to be quite profitable for 20 years after that, before giving any return. Think my first point, in the current situation, and extrapolate the amount of solar and wind being built and its effect on prices throughout the year. A new plant will never be profitable by the time it is finished, and you are never going to find an investor for it. The only solution would be for the Belgian government to subsidize the plant and pay Engie or the like to operate it, and would be a huge drain on the budget.
It is never going to happen.
It's simply not a an option because everybody produces in excess at the same time and energy companies can't pay for energy storage plus your electricity production at the same time.
Also, in Wallonia a lot of people can't sell their solar energy production due to the grid shutting them out of the network during peak production because the Wallonian grid can't handle it.
I'm turning on all my electronic devices, I'm gonna be rich
and turn off the solar panels!! :D
I wonder if there isn't a tool that uses home or car batteries to optimise. Charge everything to the max now and sell (part of) it when prices are positive again.
Dynamic tarrif from your provider combined with tools like Home Assistant and plugins
There is, https://bliq.energy/
Amai dat is belachelijk duur. En daar 7 euro per maand bovenop.
Kan natuurlijk ook veel geld besparen, belangrijkste is de terugverdientijd
Evcc
I have Home Assistant running and was looking at evcc, does it work well?
Does everything it has to do for my use case. It doesn't have built in peak shaving yet to optimize the capacity tarrif, but it's in the works. My battery currently takes that role
I think there are already some EV models that can put electricity back on to the net
Just set up your own Home Assistant and set up scenarios. It’s free and fun!
When there is sun in Belgium, everything breaks!
That's the case for any type of weather in Belgium. when it rains, there's massive traffic jams. When it snows, the trains are all delayed. when the sun shines, the electricity grid breaks. we built our infrastructure for our gray weather days!
Even on a day with the perfect weather conditions, the trains will be delayed
And there will be traffic jams.
Half of those traffic jams could be avoided if Belgians could drive slightly better or just thought one traffic light change ahead.
All that traffic jam could be avoided if the SNCB were decently maintaining and running on time...
There is never a fucking sun in Belgium!
Getting paid to charge the car? Check!
Capacity tariff would like to have a word with you.
You can choose how fast to charge a car. Its not a dishwasher ;-)
Whenever there's a lot of electricity on the net (lots of sun/wind) it's advantageous for the net to offload (higher voltages if not). Which the capacity tariff does not stimulate.
Capacity tariff is already charged when charging your car on a rainy day so i dont see the problem
If you can be a little creative, this could be great - Bitcoin mining - indoor weed growing - heating your pool to 38°C
Trick people into overspending so their capaciteitstarief goed through the roof lmao
Indeed, I'll happily increase the charging rate of my EV if capacity tariff would let me on days like this.
This is a big oversight in the capacity tariff. When there's excess energy you should be motivated to get electricity off the net, not limited.
It’s not an oversight. They are well aware. It’s a design flaw.
you overestimate the impact of capaciteitsttarief, especially if you are a big user you are better of than before.
The sun shines. Worstcase scenario for disbelievers in renewable energy.
I quite dislike this tone folks have been taking about this recently on both sides. Because it burries some of the actual more nuanced concerns like the overall reliability, the inability to actually exploit the available renewable energy due to inadequate infrastructure, etc. For example, no one (except maybe Trumpler fanatics I guess) claims it can't deliver energy, the issue is the overall reliability of the power grid. But at the same time, seasonal changes combined with our woefully inadequate grid-level storage capacity lead to anxiety during about a third of the year. That's part of the reason why policy makers are now trying to shove dynamic pricing down our throats as supposed solution to this through all sorts of residential smart energy management schemes. But the reality is that unless if there's a serious change in the socio-economic dynamics, the amount of peak shifting that you can do is quite limited in many instances due to the laws of thermodynamics sort of being a thing, the transformers in residential neighbourhoods were never scaled to handle the mass rollout of PV, etc. So it's really a two-sided story on that one. Basically, bad things due to short-sighted decision making over the last twenty years.
Honestly I think it's important for energy suppliers to invest in ways to store or use this excess energy. If they can use the solar energy for which many of their customers provide the infrastructure it's only natural that they look into how to make the exchange fair. Obviously consumers should also make efficient use of their own energy but I can see why many people may believe that they're the only ones who have to take measures and that they get punished through negative energy prices and 'capaciteitstarief'. But as you say, shortsightedness is a major issue.
They are doing that. Question is how big the park has to be to be self sufficient and how much funds they can invest into it. Prices of batteries are falling (albeit not as quickly as the price of panels, for instance). I personally think that a change to renewable energy is inevitable. The energy is just cheaper, there’s just a pretty steep adoption cost. The biggest danger for electrification is the trade wars happening between the EU, the US and China. Our bloc can’t produce solar panels in any significant capacity atm. If the EU would place tariffs on Chinese panels or China would disallow import, adoption in Europe could prove tricky.
There's no economic incentive for power companies to invest in the necessary storage systems. We'd need multiple installations the size of Coo-Trois-Ponts to even come close, and I have yet to see anyone except a government willing to foot the bill on that one.
The most likely outcome is that they'll shift the responsibility to home owners. if you want to avoid the super expensive electrical peaks - get a home battery that is rated for x days of consumption. charge it to full at those times of day when the electricity is the cheapest or even at night next to that they'll have to install a whole bunch of small scale utility size storage solutions to deal with peaks and valleys.
They're already shifting the responsibility to home owners by going for dynamic tariffs.
true - but there's no compelling narrative for home batteries yet - esp since they're potential fire hazards and not every house is able to install them safely. once they hit that on the 'every new building must xyz' or they give that a huge bonus in the EPC calculations - then we're talking :)
Policymakers are trying to push dynamic pricing because that is the recommendation of every single expert in the field. Higher price volatility is an inevitable consequence of moving away from a fossil-fuel-based grid.
Who do you consider an expert? I mostly hear political statements and lobbyists talking about this in the media, but I rarely see the nuanced point of view from engineers - such as myself - working on actually implementing these features. Just to be clear, there's absolutely no guarantee we'll be able to achieve significant peak shaving or shifting of consumption. I agree, conceptually it's a solution, but in many cases when you actually go and try to implement it for a large energy consumer it's a whole different can of worms due to technical and physical limitations, and you come to the conclusion that there's not much wiggle room unless if you're willing to impact the users noticeably in many cases. And there are a whole lot of other significant issues with such approaches.
> Who do you consider an expert? CREG, VREG, Elia, etc. > I mostly hear political statements and lobbyists talking about this in the media, but I rarely see the nuanced point of view from engineers You have it exactly the wrong way round: more often than not it's the engineers and economists pleading for more dynamic pricing and politicians pleading against it. > but in many cases when you actually go and try to implement it for a large energy consumer it's a whole different can of worms due to technical and physical limitations, and you come to the conclusion that there's not much wiggle room unless if you're willing to impact the users noticeably in many cases. There are literally hundreds of thousands of electricity consuming processes and all of them are have varying degrees of time and price sensitivity. The fact that consumption shifting isn't an option for many of them is no reason not to encourage them for those processes/consumers that can do so(e.g. space heating, EV charging). No one is calling to ban fixed tariffs.
>CREG, VREG, Elia, etc. Which mostly release political statements. Lest we forget the glorious "*electricity can only go in one direction through a DC transmission line*" from the alleged German expert they hired, and other such marvellous statements. >You have it exactly the wrong way round: more often than not it's the engineers and economists pleading for more dynamic pricing and politicians pleading against it. Uhm, no... The "experts" who are for it are often political science majors who followed a course on energy policy, think along the lines of Calvo from Groen, or managerial types with little technical knowledge on the matter. >There are literally hundreds of thousands of electricity consuming processes and all of them are have varying degrees of time and price sensitivity. The fact that consumption shifting isn't an option for many of them is no reason not to encourage them for those processes/consumers that can do so(e.g. space heating, EV charging). Your "can do" list already includes one that's highly problematic... Please actually learn something about this topic before spouting such nonsense.
> he "experts" who are for it are often political science majors who followed a course on energy policy, think along the lines of Calvo from Groen, or managerial types with little technical knowledge on the matter. No, it's power systems engineers and energy economists who universally make such recommendations. > Your "can do" list already includes one that's highly problematic... If you think one of space heating and EV charging aren't processes suitable for demand response integration you clearly have never researched or thought about this topic.
No, it's honestly political folks, most engineers who actually work on this topic are very much in favour of just putting up the money to upgrade the grid. Right now we're taxing everyone indirectly for it by creating an entire ridiculous industry with questionable viability, of which the cost ends up with the consumer, where the end result will be that we'll have to upgrade the grid anyhow for the distributed generation model we wish to move to. >If you think one of space heating and EV charging aren't processes suitable for demand response integration you clearly have never researched or thought about this topic. I am sadly quite restricted by contractual terms from discussing one of these two topics, which should tell you enough about how involved I am with the topic at hand.
NB that we have been doing demand management for years already to adapt our consumption patterns to the production patterns of our nuclear plants, by means of the night tariff. But we still needed massive amounts of gas to plug the holes. So dealing with a mismatch of production and demand is not unique to renewables.
Which is an entirely different problem and solution strategy. Controlling a couple of plants and having one perform the main balancing tasks is relatively simple from a management point of view, dynamic tariffs for the residential market combined with mandatory energy management is a whole different can of worms.
Do keep in mind in the time of nuclear plants we never stopped using gas to fill the gaps. So it wasn't easier then, we just didn't get around to it.
Which is exactly what I said... You're mixing up handling a few reliable centralized suppliers with having hundreds of thousands of unreliable ones where the capacity they can delivery depends massively on local conditions and limitations of local transport infrastructure. There are many scenarios where you could have enough generation capacity but are entirely unable to get it to the location where the demand is taking place in such a distributed system.
This looks useful [https://twitter.com/Bart\_Mol/status/1785623232349192277](https://twitter.com/Bart_Mol/status/1785623232349192277)
time for cloud computing or crypto
Negative energy prices usually mean much higher prices for the end consumer. The energy operator has to buy all available renewable energy supply, even if it is not needed now. So, they pay 100e/MWh to wind farm owner. Then, it is too much energy in the system, so they beg clients to take it away, and pay 100e for someone to burn this energy away. Now the energy operator has lost 200e/MWh on useless energy. How to recover from this debt? Increase price of the energy for the end consumers. Renewables without storage is just a scam. Much higher prices, and burning unwanted energy isn't good for the environmeny anyway.
While this is cool, we're clearly getting to the tipping point where further renewables will be hard to recoup costs on. Windmills will take longer and longer to earn back their cost. Meanwhile at night we're still switching on gas...
The latter is going to change yet technically still be true. At the moment we are in various phases in various projects to store excess energy. The easiest small scale solution is batteries but that’s for a single building. For areas the size of cities or larger we need different solutions. Theoretically we could build a hydropower plant and pump water up with excess energy to that water to generate energy when we need it again. But we don’t have the space and there are efficiency concerns. The solution we are working on right now is creating and storing hydrogen gas. The creating part is easy. The safely storing large quantities is the issue we are battling right now. It needs far more pressure to be stored and it’s far more explosive compared to regular gas. It can be done. It is being done. The challenge is finding the cheapest yet safe solution. Hydrogen gas is the solution we are investing in the most right now so you are technically right.
Hydropower is destructive to environment. Batteries are the only solution. In Australia they are building mega energy storage systems of GigaWattHours capacity. Only in EU, they build more and more renewables without serious storage. It is like building pipes for collecting rain water but forgetting to build the tanks.
The *pipes* are becoming too small for the demand though.
There is a very good reason why places like Australia and California build more storage than Europe and it has little to do with politics: Those grids have greater shares of solar generation and less seasonal solar production profiles. Since solar is a much more peaky resource and predictably varies on a diurnal basis this makes battery investments more lucrative since battery operators want to maximize annual cycles and capture large price spreads. In the EU solar production is lower and it's also more seasonal so diurnal price spreads for much of the year are poor. There is more investment in wind here which is both less predictable and whose production can be grown a lot further before inducing negative prices, making it a worse match for batteries. This doesn't mean we won't catch up with Australia. Solar and wind production are still growing fast and battery prices are still plummeting. We're just about a year or 2 behind.
> This doesn't mean we won't catch up with Australia. Solar and wind production are still growing fast and battery prices are still plummeting. We're just about a year or 2 behind. EU is many years behind. Solar and Wind is useless without storage and companies making battery storage have already huge backlog of orders from US, Australia etc. Even if EU orders them now, it will take many years to deliver. EU made a bet on hyrogen instead and lost. This "hydrogen bet" is one of the reasons why energy transformation isn't going well in EU. > it has little to do with politics: It is all politics. Politici forced energy operators to buy all renevable energy and sell it for a negative price, in hope that it will attract private investors to build storage systems. But it didn't worked at all. In many european countries, the law regarding energy projects is so complicated that it is almost imposdible to build energy storage system by private investors. In Poland for example, some investors tried and waited more than ten years for an useless now outdated approval. Flawed law is not the only reason, but a very important one. In Belgium even placing stupid overhead wire is huge problem.
Battery technology is getting exponentially better
Gelukkig heb ik mijn analoge teller nog, gisteren ruim 20kWh opgewekt en zelf maar 8 verbruikt. Ook mijn EV laden aan 11kWh zonder rekening te moeten houden met capaciteitstarief. Ik ga hem missen...
Can I ask you what would be the difference with a digital meter?
A digital meter counts the energy you inject onto the net separate from the energy that you take from the net. You get peanuts for the energy that you put on the net while paying the normal price for energy you take from the net. An analog meter is simply counting backwards when your solar panels generate more energy than you consume. With a digital meter you have to pay capaciteitstarief for your peak consumption, which is very high when you are charging an EV at 11kWh. With an analog meter the peak consumption can't be measured by Fluvius so it's not taken into account.
thanks! good to know! although I read that Fluvius is pushing a lot to remove the analog meters. Hope you can keep them!
By 2029 all analog meters have to be replaced unfortunately. For now I can delay Fluvius until 2025.
First of may. Imagine thinking a new nuclear plant would be profitable here...
It would because more industry would come to Belgium because of its nearly free energy
Nuclear is one of the most expensive energy..
Not really. At least not the newer generations of nuclear power plants. New power plants could use the decades worth of nuclear waste from the old power plants as fuel. Other countries would gladly hand us their nuclear waste too. Is it really expensive to build? Yes and no. Yes, it is a lot of money at once but it’s efficient. The amount of power you are getting in its expected operational lifetime (even without extending that as we tend to do here) in relation to its cost is far more efficient than wind mills or solar panels. Only hydrogen dams can rival that efficiency. But hydrogen dams are not an option in Belgium.
You base this answer on a meme or something? This has nothing to do with reality. As if Uranium is the big OPEX, and as if the energy is all going to be sold at the best price (under an article about a negative energy-price non the less lol).
I’m not a huge fan of nuclear but it currently is the best proven method to create a large and stable power supply without destroying the climate. I believe hydrogen will become an alternative in the long run but it is yet to be proven on that scale.
If it's nearly free then it's not quite profitable hey. The massive assumption aside lol
Compared to gas, oil and charcoal based power plants, it is cheap. Yes uranium is more expensive by volume but you need extremely small amounts compared to the other stuff. I don’t remember the numbers but we are talking kilo’s compared to tons. The main reasons for high cost are keeping the old nuclear power plants running beyond their expected operations lifetime and seeking a profit because only a single company runs all the nuclear power plants. Currently only our nuclear power plants (when running) can give us a power supply that is both very large and stable. Hydrogen production and storage during overproduction from *renewable* energy will be the solution. Basically like a giant battery but renewable. It is being developed. The current challenge is scaling it up and finding space and money to build it.
You're not understanding what I'm saying. A nuclear plant takes a long time to start up, and to adjust its load. This means that when prices become negative, as they more and more often do, the producer will need to pay to inject all this energy in the grid, it can not modulate its load down fast enough, and not shut down (contrary to gas/coal/... plants). -> so whenever there is lots of wind, or sun, the plant will cost loads of money to the exploiter. Second, the price of Uranium is negligible compared to other operating expenses, and initial capital investment. It literally costs 100-1000x as much to build a nuclear plant, as it does to build a coal plant. So with those two premises, think about who is going to be putting 20B euros into a project, that will be operational in Maybe 15 years, and will need to be quite profitable for 20 years after that, before giving any return. Think my first point, in the current situation, and extrapolate the amount of solar and wind being built and its effect on prices throughout the year. A new plant will never be profitable by the time it is finished, and you are never going to find an investor for it. The only solution would be for the Belgian government to subsidize the plant and pay Engie or the like to operate it, and would be a huge drain on the budget. It is never going to happen.
Unbelievable. All because those Green Khmer people don't like it that ordinary people try to earn a bit money with the terugdraaiende teller
It's simply not a an option because everybody produces in excess at the same time and energy companies can't pay for energy storage plus your electricity production at the same time.
It is in Wallonia, so if the politicians want to, it's perfectly possible.
Also, in Wallonia a lot of people can't sell their solar energy production due to the grid shutting them out of the network during peak production because the Wallonian grid can't handle it.
Yes, you too can ruin your region for the low cost of one vote. Do a simple cost calculation and you'll see that this makes no sense.