kravietz 🦇6d ago

Wow, who would have expected a Dunkelflaute in March? But here it is:

  • #Germany - the “energy transformation leader with the most renewables in Europe” - 604 gCO2eq/kWh
  • #Poland - old coal baseline country that is heavily investing in wind and building its first nuclear power plant - 582 gCO2eq/kWh
  • #France - the hopeless case of old, legacy #nuclear that has “no future” and “contributes nothing to decarbonisation” (literal quotes) - 38 gCO2eq/kWh

It’s not a typo, the last number is really “38”, that is 16x less than the first number. And the whole point of #decarbonisation is to emit less CO2.

Show threadMartin Cigan6d ago
@kravietz I thought one would also like not burn money by building overly expensive power plants, like Poland does. But in this case one might assume power generation is the least concern
Show threadkravietz 🦇6d ago

@martincigan

How do you define “expensive”? In case of electricity generation, there’s like three ways to measure that.

Show threadSpeed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸5d ago
@kravietz But, seriously, do you have a link? I'd like to explore. @martincigan
Show threadkravietz 🦇

@hakona @martincigan

There’s three ways to define “cost” in this context:

  • “overnight investment cost” - in case of large infrastructure project it is, obviously, “expensive” - measured in tens of billions of euros. For example, 30 billion euros for the Denmark Wind Hub[^1] is a lot but making an argument of that being “expensive” is dishonest because it ignores the amount of electricity provided during project’s lifetime. It’s like saying a 200 W diesel generator is “cheap” and a 2’000’000 W power plant is “expensive”, which is formally true but misses the point.
  • LCOE (levelized cost of electricity), or simply all costs (construction, operations, disposal) divided by the amount of electricity delivered during project’s lifetime; this was the most popular metric before renewables because all electricity sources were dispatchable. But renewables are variable in time and power, and consumers expect 24/7 electricity, so using it as an ultimate metric is again missing the point. You may have 100 GW installed (nominal) power in PV but when it’s not working, it’s producing zero electricity (GWh), so you need a second power plant to provide the consumers during that period. So focusing on the PV LCOE only is formally true, but again misses the point of the total cost of providing 24/7 supply based on that source.
  • LFSCOE (levelized full-system cost of electricity) which is the metric that describes the complete cost of providing 24/7 electricity using particular source and is the best indicator of the actual cost of that source. For example, if you want to use PV but to get 24/7 supply it also requires you to build a hydro storage or battery storage, then LFSCOE will capture this dependency.

Comparison of LCOE and LFSCOE for various sources can be found here.[^2] Please note the difference between various LFSCOE models, because they are theoretical “pure” models based e.g. on 100% PV which is rarely the case in real life, so they shouldn’t be read as “literal cost of PV” but more like an indicator.

[^1]: https://www.newsweek.com/denmark-energy-island-billion-delays-1945598

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Global_studies

Mar 15 at 1:55pmWeb
Show threadSpeed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸5d ago
@kravietz I suspect we all pick the metric we like , but the practical truth lies somewhere between the second and third. A lot can be influenced by proper planning at all levels, from individual to national, to bring the real cost of renewables closer to the LCOE. The overnight investment cost is, like you said, not sensible. @martincigan