General > General Technical Chat
"Gas Armageddon": Energy/electricity prices in EU/UK (and how to deal with them)
Siwastaja:
--- Quote from: JohanH on September 08, 2022, 08:47:02 am ---On a serious note, ever heard of energy rationing? This is pretty much turning into war time and there is only one main actor to blame.
--- End quote ---
Don't let your (justified) anger misguide you. Energy crisis is much more complex than that.
Remember December 2021? People panic-switching from spot contracts back to fixed contracts because all time high prices exceeding 1EUR/kWh? I'm at loss how people collectively forgot this so quickly and started to talk about "Putin's prices" when this is just repeating.
Remember winter 2020? Grids of Sweden and Finland both on the brink of collapse. Fingrid reserve power plants running. Yet we are told in media "oh, nothing's going on, it was just a coincidence, we wanted to test run all these facilities, no worries at all". And we did import from Sweden who kindly supplied us despite their own shortage.
So there is nothing new here. Root cause is poor political choices all over Europe for decades and decades. We can only blame our own politicians, and ourselves for voting them.
coppice:
--- Quote from: JohanH on September 08, 2022, 08:47:02 am ---On a serious note, ever heard of energy rationing? This is pretty much turning into war time and there is only one main actor to blame.
--- End quote ---
Energy rationing is easy to achieve by controlling gas stations, and turning off mains power at selected times. However, I wonder what they can do with gas, which seems to be the thing with the biggest supply problem? Don't they need careful procedures to prevent explosions when turning the public gas supply off and on? I'm not sure. I've never seen the flow of gas stop since it was first turned on.
wraper:
--- Quote from: tom66 on September 08, 2022, 10:56:52 am ---Russia effectively sanctioned Ukrainian grain by blockading the Black Sea. There are not sufficient land routes to get grain into international markets otherwise.
Anyway, it does not matter too much where the grain from Ukraine goes because allowing more grain into the market will cause prices to fall regardless.
Also let's not forget that Russia stole a load of Ukrainian grain too: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/61790625
--- End quote ---
Ukrainians placed sea mines too to prevent Russians invading from the sea. So it was not as simple as just Russians allowing food tankers to pass.
tom66:
--- Quote from: wraper on September 08, 2022, 11:22:46 am ---Ukrainians placed sea mines too to prevent Russians invading from the sea. So it was not a simple as just Russians allowing food tankers to pass.
--- End quote ---
And part of the agreement was that Ukraine would guide the ships through the unmined areas. This is not news. The problem is that Russia decided to invade Ukraine. You cannot justify Russia's actions here, because they have no moral or legal justification.
JohanH:
--- Quote from: Siwastaja on September 08, 2022, 10:59:43 am ---
Don't let your (justified) anger misguide you. Energy crisis is much more complex than that.
--- End quote ---
Of course it is politics that has caused the practical problems, whether it's countries shutting down NPP (Germany, Sweden), too much reliance on gas (Germany) or too much reliance on energy import (Finland). Now the Finnish national grid's (Finngrid) CEO recently stated that next year Finland will for the first time in 50 years produce as much electricity in a year as consumed. Not sure about peak capacity, though. Finngrid has 1.3 GW reserve capacity that can be started in 10-15 minutes. Two of these power plants already ran last night due to the exceptionally cold night. So there's nothing surprising to have reserve capacity running, it's part of the overall electrical supply contingency.
California grid had yesterday an all time high peak of 52 GW and texted all citizens to lower electrical consumption to avoid having to shut off parts of the grid. People listened and instantly lowered electrical consumption with several GW.
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