Nuclear Troubles Send French Winter Power Prices Soaring

By Michael Kern - Apr 19, 2023

France’s power prices for early 2024 are double the German prices for next winter as the huge French nuclear fleet continues to show signs of weak output and availability.  

The French power price for the first quarter of 2024 was at $455 (416 euros) per megawatt-hour (MWh) on Wednesday. That’s more than double the price for the same period in Germany, where the power price was at $185 (169 euros) per MWh for early 2024, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

France has had troubles at many of its nuclear reactors, half of which have been shut down for repairs and maintenance at several times over the past year.

Germany, meanwhile, took its last three nuclear power plants offline on Saturday, ending more than six decades of commercial nuclear energy use. Germany ended the nuclear power era despite continued concerns about energy security and energy supply after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the end of pipeline natural gas deliveries from Russia, which was the largest gas supplier to Europe’s biggest economy before the war.

In France, concerns about the operations at France’s large nuclear power fleet resurfaced last month after the French nuclear safety authority, ASN, told energy giant and large nuclear reactor operator EDF to review its program of reactor checks, following the finding of another crack at a nuclear power plant.

This led to an 8% one-day surge in French power prices for next year, the biggest jump since the end of January.  

For much of last year, France’s nuclear power generation was well below capacity, as more than half of the country’s reactors were offline at one point in the autumn due to repairs or maintenance.  

At the moment, French nuclear power plants are producing 17.5% less than the average output rate for 2020 and 2021. That’s down from 23% last year, so there is some progress, but concerns remain.  

Wind Power Has A Profitability Problem

By Felicity Bradstock - Apr 19, 2023

• Despite the sharp growth over the last decade, companies are realising that it is difficult to translate wind power into profits.
• 
  
• Some of the world’s biggest wind energy companies are making huge losses despite their economies of scale.
• 
  
• Many companies remain optimistic about the growth prospects for wind energy because of generous government support.

Despite the strong push to shift to green by installing more renewable energy capacity, many are asking whether the wind energy industry will be able to bounce back quickly from huge losses last year to develop the wind power needed to fuel the green transition. In 2022, several major wind energy firms reported billions in losses due to a plethora of challenges that have made it harder to develop new wind farms worldwide. Now the fear is that companies around the globe may be unwilling to invest in the wind projects needed to accelerate the movement away from fossil fuels to green alternatives if they cannot see the potential for profits. 

Wind energy has grown exponentially in recent years thanks to a huge amount of funding in research and development and the rollout of several large-scale onshore and offshore wind farms around the globe. Innovations in turbine technology have led to the development of giant power generators that are much safer, more reliable, and quieter than their predecessors. 

In 2021, electricity generation from wind power grew by a record 273?TWh, a 17 percent increase from the previous year. This rise was around 55 percent higher than that of 2020 and was the highest of all renewable energy technologies. The reason for such rapid growth was the huge investment seen in the development of wind energy projects worldwide, with capacity additions reaching 113?GW in 2020 compared to 59?GW in 2019. The global wind power capacity stood at around 1,870 TWh in 2021, compared to 343 TWh in 2010. Although this figure will have to increase substantially more to meet net-zero goals, to 7,900?TWh in 2030.                

Despite the sharp growth over the last decade, companies are realising that it is difficult to translate wind power into profits. There is no problem when it comes to the global demand for wind power, which continues to grow year after year as countries attempt to curb their reliance on fossil fuels. But wind power research and development, as well as the construction of enormous wind farms, don’t come cheap and the return so far is not what many companies expected. 

In June last year, there were reports that some of the world’s biggest wind energy companies were battling heavy losses. Vestas Wind Systems, General Electric Co., and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy all faced extremely high raw material and logistics costs following the pandemic when supply chains were disrupted. This came after an arms race in which wind majors were competing to build the tallest, most powerful wind turbines at whatever cost would put them ahead of the rest. Ben Backwell, CEO of the trade group Global Wind Energy Council, stated “What I’m seeing is a colossal market failure.” Backwell added, “The risk is we’re not on track for net zero [emissions] -- and the other risk is the supply chain contracts, instead of expanding.” 

By November 2022, GE was predicting $2 billion in losses in its renewable energy division, largely due to inflation and supply chain challenges. This has led the company to make cuts, with plans to reduce its global headcount at onshore facilities by 20 percent over a year. Many wind companies have felt the triple whammy of inflation, reduced tax incentives, and rising interest rates of the last year, adding to the supply chain disruptions of the pandemic. Vestas, the world's biggest wind turbine maker, reported its first annual loss in almost a decade in 2022, of around $1.68 billion. The firm said that its sales last year fell by around 7 percent, and it faced rising costs across several areas. The company stated in its annual report “Vestas and the wind industry were ready to provide solutions to address the energy crisis, but were constrained by cost increases, logistical challenges, outdated market designs and permitting processes.” Meanwhile, Siemens Energy reported a net loss of more than $943.48 million. 

Experts are now questioning whether companies will be able to bounce back from these losses to produce the 250-GW a year growth required to meet global 2030 wind capacity targets. Luckily, despite the losses, many companies remain optimistic about their prospects. In the U.S., this has partly been driven by the new tax credits and subsidies expected to arrive from Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Further, with demand for wind power expected to continue growing for decades to come, the challenges faced now are seen as a temporary blip on an overall positive trajectory. 

Aaron Barr, an industry analyst at Wood Mackenzie, stated “The wind energy market is stuck in this very strange paradox right now… We have the best long-term climate policy certainty ever, across all the largest markets, but we’re struggling through a period where the whole industry, particularly the supply chain, has been hit by issues that have culminated in destroying profit margins and running many of the top OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] and their component vendors into negative profitability territory.” 

The promise of high demand and new grants and subsidies are keeping the wind energy industry’s spirits high, and we can expect more incentives for new wind capacity worldwide as other countries and regions introduce their own climate policies. But governments around the globe must continue to provide incentives to encourage greater development to ensure that companies are not deterred by major recent losses from rolling out new wind projects. 

By Felicity Bradstock for Oilprice.com

MIT Study: Nuclear Power Shutdown Could Lead To Increased Deaths

By Brian Westenhaus - Apr 19, 2023

• A new MIT study indicates that retiring U.S. nuclear power plants could lead to an increase in burning fossil fuels to fill the energy gap, resulting in over 5,000 premature deaths due to increased air pollution.
• 
  
• Nearly 20 percent of current electricity in the U.S. comes from nuclear power, with a fleet of 92 reactors scattered around the country.
• 
  
• If more renewable energy sources become available to supply the grid by 2030, air pollution could be curtailed, but there may still be a slight increase in pollution-related deaths.

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology new study shows that if U.S. nuclear power plants are retired, the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas to fill the energy gap could cause more than 5,000 premature deaths.

The MIT team took on the questions in the text following in a new study appearing in Nature Energy.

Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these power plants have run for more than half a century and are approaching the end of their expected lifetimes.

Policymakers are debating whether to retire the aging reactors or reinforce their structures to continue producing nuclear energy, which many consider a low-carbon alternative to climate-warming coal, oil, and natural gas.

Now, MIT researchers say there’s another factor to consider in weighing the future of nuclear power: air quality. In addition to being a low carbon-emitting source, nuclear power is relatively clean in terms of the air pollution it generates. Without nuclear power, how would the pattern of air pollution shift, and who would feel its effects?

The team laid out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year.

Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power’s absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year.

If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year.

When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities – a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants – experienced the greatest exposure.

Lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) said, “This adds one more layer to the environmental health and social impacts equation when you’re thinking about nuclear shutdowns, where the conversation often focuses on local risks due to accidents and mining or long-term climate impacts.”

Study author Noelle Selin, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and EAPS added, “In the debate over keeping nuclear power plants open, air quality has not been a focus of that discussion. What we found was that air pollution from fossil fuel plants is so damaging, that anything that increases it, such as a nuclear shutdown, is going to have substantial impacts, and for some people more than others.”

The study’s MIT-affiliated co-authors also include Principal Research Scientist Sebastian Eastham and Guillaume Chossière SM ’17, PhD ’20, along with Alan Jenn of the University of California at Davis.

Future phase-outs

 When nuclear power plants have closed in the past, fossil fuel use increased in response. In 1985, the closure of reactors in Tennessee Valley prompted a spike in coal use, while the 2012 shutdown of a plant in California led to an increase in natural gas. In Germany, where nuclear power has almost completely been phased out, coal-fired power increased initially to fill the gap.

Noting these trends, the MIT team wondered how the U.S. energy grid would respond if nuclear power were completely phased out.

“We wanted to think about what future changes were expected in the energy grid,” Freese says. “We knew that coal use was declining, and there was a lot of work already looking at the impact of what that would have on air quality. But no one had looked at air quality and nuclear power, which we also noticed was on the decline.”

In the new study, the team used an energy grid dispatch model developed by Jenn to assess how the U.S. energy system would respond to a shutdown of nuclear power. The model simulates the production of every power plant in the country and runs continuously to estimate, hour by hour, the energy demands in 64 regions across the country.

Much like the way the actual energy market operates, the model chooses to turn a plant’s production up or down based on cost: Plants producing the cheapest energy at any given time are given priority to supply the grid over more costly energy sources.The team fed the model available data on each plant’s changing emissions and energy costs throughout an entire year. They then ran the model under different scenarios, including: an energy grid with no nuclear power, a baseline grid similar to today’s that includes nuclear power, and a grid with no nuclear power that also incorporates the additional renewable sources that are expected to be added by 2030.

They combined each simulation with an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate how each plant’s various emissions travel around the country and to overlay these tracks onto maps of population density. For populations in the path of pollution, they calculated the risk of premature death based on their degree of exposure.

System response

 Their analysis showed a clear pattern: Without nuclear power, air pollution worsened in general, mainly affecting regions in the East Coast, where nuclear power plants are mostly concentrated. Without those plants, the team observed an uptick in production from coal and gas plants, resulting in 5,200 pollution-related deaths across the country, compared to the baseline scenario.

They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power’s absence. The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century.

Freese noted, “We need to be thoughtful about how we’re retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system. Shutting down something that doesn’t have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond.”

Selin added, “This might mean that we need to deploy even more renewables, in order to fill the hole left by nuclear, which is essentially a zero-emissions energy source. Otherwise we will have a reduction in air quality that we weren’t necessarily counting on.”

***

This kind of work is always useful. Yet there always remain the matters of the assumptions used for inputs and the model itself. Even so, there is obviously some impact from removing a source that has its carbon imprint already in as paid for and replacing it with a new facility and different fuel source.

Then there is the political forcing issue that isn’t in the popular press, either legacy or modern internet sites. There is a huge increase in power demand being forced. One fellow, John Kudla came up with some numbers, not a model, just a napkin listing of what the political forcing is going to entail. It destroys the premise of nuclear substitution with either renewables or fossil power for generating current to meet the political demands. Note, the elites will be running the energy segment of the economy instead of the market.

For 100 years electrical power development has become the engine for modern life. Taking nuclear power and fossil fuels out of the energy source foundation is an idea of immense size and deep concern. Any hope of living standards getting better as a whole – disappear. Only the very wealthy and elites can expect a lifestyle of some equivalency to today. Its only natural – they’ll be running the system.

THEY ALREADY ARE

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel 

 

G7 Ministers Decide Natural Gas Investment Is Still Necessary

By ZeroHedge - Apr 18, 2023

• Environmentalists are unhappy with the results of the last G7 summit in Sapporo.
• 
  
• The G7 ministers also concluded their conclave on Sunday without setting a deadline for halting new coal investments.
• 
  
• The G7 ministers agreed that new investment in natural gas was still needed.
• 
  

Environmentalists are up in arms over apparent slack added to the Group of Seven's energy and environmental goals, after ministers decided that the 'war in Ukraine and its effects on oil and gas' warrant breaking what are supposed to be 'firm commitments' that climate advocates say are necessary to limit global warming. 

Nishimura Yasutoshi, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, Environment Minister Akihiro Nishimura and other delegates attend the opening session of G7 Ministers? Meeting on Climate, Energy and Environment in Sapporo, Japan April 15, 2023, in this photo released by Kyodo. Mandatory credit Kyodo via REUTERS

Most notably, the ministers left the door open to new investment in natural gas and ongoing use of fossil fuels.

The G7 ministers also concluded their conclave on Sunday without setting a deadline for halting new coal investments, though they did pinky-swear to 'work toward' cleaning emissions from power generation and reducing vehicle emissions by 2035.

"It falls short of being the clarion call to action that was needed," said Alden Meyer, a senior associate at climate change think tank E3G during a Twitter Spaces conversation, adding that the G7 undermines its global authority "every time they allow carve-outs on issues like international fossil fuel finance."

The G7, the seven most developed countries, consider themselves stewards of the global effort to reduce greenhouse glasses - and their communique 'sets the tone for negotiations around energy and climate among the Group of 20 countries and at the UN climate summit — COP28 — in Dubai in November,' Bloomberg reports.

The new statement seemed to weaken at least one previous commitment, climate activists said.  At last year’s meeting, the group’s promise was specific: to halt “new direct public support for the international unabated fossil fuel energy sector by the end of 2022, except in limited circumstances clearly defined by each country that are consistent with a 1.5°C warming limit.”

But now, with the war in Ukraine and its effects on oil and gas supplies stretching into a second year, the group said “investment in the gas sector can be appropriate to help address potential market shortfalls,” as long as they’re “implemented in a manner consistent with our climate objectives and without creating lock-in effects.” -Bloomberg

French Energy Minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher pushed back at critics, saying that the new language was actually more strict than what was originally envisioned, and that it "implicitly means that we cannot invest in the exploration of new gas capacity."

She also told reporters on Saturday that while the highlight of this year's negotiations was an agreement to phase out 'unabated' fossil fuels more rapidly, the group "could not reach an agreement on exiting coal by a specific date."

The final language was said to have been crafted to appease Japan, which hosted the meeting, as well as Germany's Deputy Energy Minister Patrick Graichen, which called the group's position "carefully balanced."

That said, the G7 meeting did result in several commitments - including a plan to boost solar capacity by more than 1,000 gigawatts, and offshore wind generation to 150 gigawatts across member nations by the end of the decade, a move which would triple solar power and increase offshore wind capacity seven-fold.

"The G-7 are confirming that solar and wind are in line for takeoff," said Dave Jones, head of data insights at energy think tank Ember said in the same Twitter Spaces, adding that the commitments show "very clearly that wind and solar are the biggest and cheapest tools in the toolbox to reduce emissions this decade."

The group also acknowledged, but did nothing about, a plan to collectively cut vehicle emissions by at least 50% by 2035.

By Zerohedge.com

Atomic Breakthrough Could Have Huge Implications For Petroleum Refining

By Brian Westenhaus - Apr 18, 2023

• University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have developed a model of catalytic reactions at the atomic scale.
• 
  
• The model uses powerful simulation techniques and offers deeper insights into transition metal catalysts and their role in industrial processes.
• 
  
• This breakthrough could potentially lead to energy savings, greener industrial processes, and more energy-efficient catalysts.

University of Wisconsin-Madison chemical engineers have developed a model of how catalytic reactions work at the atomic scale. It should be an advance considered a breakthrough in computational chemistry research. The understanding could allow engineers and chemists to develop more efficient catalysts and tune industrial processes – potentially with enormous energy savings, given that 90% of the products we encounter in our lives are produced, at least partially, via catalysis.

The team published the news of their advance in the journal Science.

Catalyst materials accelerate chemical reactions without undergoing changes themselves. They are critical for refining petroleum products and for manufacturing pharmaceuticals, plastics, food additives, fertilizers, green fuels, industrial chemicals and much more. There are two brief motion videos available in a zip file at this link on the Science abstract page.

Scientists and engineers have spent decades fine-tuning catalytic reactions – yet because it’s currently impossible to directly observe those reactions at the extreme temperatures and pressures often involved in industrial-scale catalysis, they haven’t known exactly what is taking place on the nano and atomic scales. This new research helps unravel that mystery with potentially major ramifications for industry.

In fact, just three catalytic reactions – steam-methane reforming to produce hydrogen, ammonia synthesis to produce fertilizer, and methanol synthesis – use close to 10% of the world’s energy.

Manos Mavrikakis, a professor of chemical and biological engineering at UW-Madison who led the research said, “If you decrease the temperatures at which you have to run these reactions by only a few degrees, there will be an enormous decrease in the energy demand that we face as humanity today. By decreasing the energy needs to run all these processes, you are also decreasing their environmental footprint.”

Mavrikakis and postdoctoral researchers Lang Xu and Konstantinos G. Papanikolaou along with graduate student Lisa Je developed and used powerful modeling techniques to simulate catalytic reactions at the atomic scale. For this study, they looked at reactions involving transition metal catalysts in nanoparticle form, which include elements like platinum, palladium, rhodium, copper, nickel, and others important in industry and green energy.

According to the current rigid-surface model of catalysis, the tightly packed atoms of transition metal catalysts provide a 2D surface that chemical reactants adhere to and participate in reactions. When enough pressure and heat or electricity is applied, the bonds between atoms in the chemical reactants break, allowing the fragments to recombine into new chemical products.

Mavrikakis explained, “The prevailing assumption is that these metal atoms are strongly bonded to each other and simply provide ‘landing spots’ for reactants. What everybody has assumed is that metal-metal bonds remain intact during the reactions they catalyze. So here, for the first time, we asked the question, ‘Could the energy to break bonds in reactants be of similar amounts to the energy needed to disrupt bonds within the catalyst?'”

According to Mavrikakis’s modeling, the answer is yes. The energy provided for many catalytic processes to take place is enough to break bonds and allow single metal atoms (known as adatoms) to pop loose and start traveling on the surface of the catalyst. These adatoms combine into clusters, which serve as sites on the catalyst where chemical reactions can take place much easier than the original rigid surface of the catalyst.

Using a set of special calculations, the team looked at industrially important interactions of eight transition metal catalysts and 18 reactants, identifying energy levels and temperatures likely to form such small metal clusters, as well as the number of atoms in each cluster, which can also dramatically affect reaction rates.

Their experimental collaborators at the University of California, Berkeley, used atomically-resolved scanning tunneling microscopy to look at carbon monoxide adsorption on nickel (111), a stable, crystalline form of nickel useful in catalysis. Their experiments confirmed models that showed various defects in the structure of the catalyst can also influence how single metal atoms pop loose, as well as how reaction sites form.

Mavrikakis says the new framework is challenging the foundation of how researchers understand catalysis and how it takes place. It may apply to other non-metal catalysts as well, which he will investigate in future work. It is also relevant to understanding other important phenomena, including corrosion and tribology, or the interaction of surfaces in motion.

“We’re revisiting some very well-established assumptions in understanding how catalysts work and, more generally, how molecules interact with solids,” Mavrikakis said.

***

Its well worth a read of the press release as there are 6 paragraphs of credits for collaborators, and support of funding and resources. It looks like this is a much bigger project than a press release can describe in a few paragraphs.

This work looks like something that time will prove to be very significant. Eight metals were tested in the work and collaboration was running experiments for model confirmation. It looks like a very well thought through program of research.

When this level of importance comes along there is one thing that seems is always missing in the press releases. One does wonder about the hypothesis mentioned above, was that what set this program in motion? If it was, the team got very far along, indeed.

By Brian Westenhaus via New Energy and Fuel