News and information from Europe 🇪🇺
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Key point is how will that effectively affect the average home consumers ?
From the article is hasn’t yet - it is expected to positively influence further pricing… but yet we are all on the Europe market based on gaz prices aren’t we?
Someone pocketed that but not consumers… which is for me a critical point in adoption of renewables : if whatever we commit to doesn’t bring relief it will not be popular enough.
I always like to check out the data myself. Out of the 39 countries Eurostat tracks for household electricity prices, Portugal is 17th highest. Prices decreased around 1% last year for consumers. Portugal consumers pay the 5th highest rate of taxes and levies for electricity in the same cohort. Last year, Portugal had the third highest increase in electricity prices for businesses.
This is a mixed bag for me. They're about middle of the pack for consumer prices, but prices aren't coming down, and businesses are facing massive increases. This will have downstream effects on jobs and the economy. See Germany.
The fixed part of an electric bill in Portugal is insane, both because of a good chunk of it are taxes charged via it and because the "fixed network connection costs" are very high.
This means that if one invests in saving power the returns of that are pretty bad because there's still this huge immovable cost chunk from merelly having a grid connection: I've been an early adopter of things like LED lights and tend to take power consumption in account for my computing equipment and nowadays outside Winter (when I spend a lot of power in warming as over 70% of houses in Portugal have very bad insulation and mine is one of those >70%) my bill is literally only half actual electricity costs and the other half is that fixed componen - my incentive for saving power is mainly one of principle because the actual financial incentive only goes so far before you start seeing diminishing returns from investing into more efficient electric devices.
Meanwhile policies in Portugal are such that they almost try and stop people from having home solar - for example if you try and sell excess power to the grid you'll get at best 1/4 the price that it costs when you buy power from the grid, so it's simply not worth it to have an installation which produces excess power, all this in one of the countries with the highest number of sunshine hours in Europe were it would make a lot of sense for people to have home solar.
And then, of course, there's the French problem: specifically France keeps refusing the creation a proper connection for the Iberian countries to sell its excess of power due to Renewables to the rest of Europe (because France wants to sell their own from their large number of Nuclear Power Plants at a higher price), so there are actually plans to do it with cables in the middle of the Med going around France and enter the rest of the continent via Italy.
I imagine as we move to renewables, a lot of places are gonna have similar situation. Maybe not as bad, but I don't know what the situation with the taxes there is.
There's a fixed cost associated with having the infrastructure that maintains a wire from consumer to producer functional, if you're not paying for electricity, you're paying for all the transmission lines and other hardware.
I can't imagine any grid making it profitable for people to sell power to it, sounds like a nightmare to try and balance load with random home setups bumping it up and down, but a fully self-sufficient solar home could probably eliminate all costs but maintenance for the grid connection, if you want backup to solar.
Meanwhile Germany is thinking about plans to make private solar users pay to have their surplus energy put in thd grid.
Yeah sorry but that's completely sensible. Grid-scale solar is awesome, but private solar is a symptom of complete government failure.
Compared to grid-scale you have:
Getting ~30% back on the energy you put back into the grid is fair when you that into account (distribution is more than half of your actual energy cost, therefore putting 1 kWh back into the grid does not discharge you from paying for 1 kWh of distribution costs!).
If the government was doing its fucking job no house would have solar on the roof (except in remote places for outage preparedness) because when you account for externalities it doesn't make any goddamn financial sense. Put those panels in former colza fields by the GW if you want cheap electricity.
Pay to maintain the grid but get paid for the injected energy, like is already the case in a few EU countries, correct?
Get paid a pittance yeah. The grid has been rotting for decades now (that's what years of conservative government gets you)
I know but in the end it’s a net income, not expense; and it’s been like this everywhere in Europe as clean energy generation Increased, the energy producer participates more in the maintenance cost of the grid. I think people should get paid fairly for the energy they generate though, to justify this or the investment in a domestic battery that can supply the grid when there’s demand
Most of Renewables in Portugal is hydro-generation so it's highly dependent on amount of rain, in a country which the Global Warming models say it's going to turn into pretty much a desert except in the coastal areas.
This is why just a year ago only 45% of electricity came from Renewables since, after 2 years of draught, most dams were pretty much empty, whilst right now the country has had so much rain in the last couple of months that dams are full to the brim and even have had to release excess water, and there are even floods around most major rivers.
Given the way things are going, Portugal needs to invest more in Solar since the very high capacity in terms of hidro-generation (a policy that dates all the way back to Fascist days, possibly the only good thing those types ever did for the country) will turn far less usefull with Global Warming.
The hydro generation is no longer as dominant as you suggest, but it has also 2 other important functions: water reservoir and energy battery: when there's lots of wind that excess of energy is used to pump water upstream to some dams, that can produce energy at other time.
The strength of any renewable system is diversity of sources and mechanisms.
Yes, several dams in Portugal do have the capability of pumping water up to the top reservoir when there is excess power from other sources to latter use it for power production when conditions change.
However most don't and for those, given that the long term trend is that hydro-generation is going to be a lot less effective in Portugal and in the meanwhile it's already become less reliable, they'll become a lot less effective, hence why Renewables in Portugal was just 45% a years ago when the country wasn't having an unusually high-precipitation period like now and instead was at in its second year of draught conditions (a situation which has become much more common in the last couple of decades).
Further, solar is hugelly underdeveloped in what is one of the countries of Europe with the most sunshine, no doubt due to amongst other things policies that de facto reduce incentives for home solar all in the service of keeping the profits of politically well-connected local Power Companies high.
The country needs more solar generation, especially home generation as well as the kind of solar technologies - like molten salt solar concentrators - that are capable of keeping generating power at night.
In light of Global Warming trends there's still a long way to go for Renewables in Portugal, IMHO, and local policies are still quite disjointed and poluted by politicians putting the interests of a handful of private companies above all else.
Awesome! Well done Portugal!!
B-b-but they told me renewables are expensive and don't work at night!
renewables are cheap, solar don't work at night. Portugal has 37% hydro, 35% wind, 4% solar. Not all the countries have access to that much wind and hydro capacity. Italy is a stark example of a country with zero wind potential in the most industrialized areas (the padana plain). Having a big hydro potential is also great as hydropower is dispatchable. That means you do not need to build batteries to address the instability of renewable like wind. Renewable is great, but is not the universal solution. Each country and each grid need to work with what is given by nature to optimize the best for the use-case and level of consumption. Not all countries are lucky as Norway, Denmark, Ireland or Portugal. Italy is great for solar, but you said it yourself: solar do not work at night. So you either need nuclear or tons of batteries to decarbonize the grid.
There is nothing wrong with solar + batteries, because battery prices (like solar) have been falling massively in the last few years. So solar + enough battery capacity is still dramatically cheaper that fossil fuels. Just look at what South Australian has been doing in the last few years.
solar + enough battery capacity is still dramatically cheaper that fossil fuels
This is not true everywhere. Solar + battery is dramatically cheaper if you only care about daily, 4h storage, to manage peaks. It is not cheaper if you need to manage multi-week lows with high reliability (like the one a gas power plant provide). To cover that use-case you need more investment in the grid, in solar overprovisioning (4x the usual capacity) and a lot of batteries. That makes the solar + battery solution costing around the same as nuclear and fossil fuel in most places. It is already cheaper in places like Australia, Texas, MENA region. It would be double the cost if done in places like Germany, or Scandinavia.
Nonetheless, battery + solar is the future for places like Spain, Italy (still not in the north plain as fog can stop solar production for weeks): the price will go further down, and hybrid storage solution and small nuclear reactors could optimize the battery + solar combo even further.
They are expensive if you don't build the grid to transfer the power to where it is needed. Then if some part of the country has a lot more than the other part you get to stop the renewables in one part and run Gas and Coal Power in the other to make up for. So younger to pay it twice.
You know, exactly how the CXU fucked it up in Germany.
Actually the Iberian peninsula countries - Spain and Portugal - want to sell their excess of Renewable to the rest of Europe, but France keeps blocking creating a connection for that throught their territory as it would negativelly impact the price they get selling their Nucleal power.
It would make a lot of sense to have an Europe-wide high capacity grid across large enough distances that it averaged out a lot of the local weather factors, but some countries are blocking it to maintain the profits of their own private electric power businesses.
It is not like grid is free. Grid costs a lot. Cables cost a lot. Transformers cost a lot. Transferring power incur in loss. Furthermore, if it is windy in Denmark, probably is windy also in Germany. While grid connections are indeed important, diversification of energy sources and storage are even better.
In 2024 not it did cost 554 Mio€ for powering down solar and wind, while they were usable.
Meanwhile in Bavaria the CSU is sabotaging the creation oft Wind power for example. In 2023 they stated they want to build 1000 new wind power plants. In 3 years they managed 30. In BW, which is half as big, it was 2024 27. That same year 154 plants went online in NRW.
Yeah, we need a better grid. But it would help if more renewable sources would be build every where. That would also reduce the cost.
Honorary balkan status revoked
Portugal is still eastern europe, despite their best efforts
Renewable energy and LGBT rights are our Western traits, plus the Atlantic coast. But besides that, we're Balkan core.
LGBT rights? But isn't that, like, a bit gay?
Just a tiny bit.. it's our latin lover side 😁
I'm just kidding, I think it's great!
You're also slipping in alcohol consumption. Almost down to Nordic levels. Not very Balkan imo.
Maybe my numbers are a bit outdated. Wikipedia only has data for 1996-2019. Glad to hear the trend is turning positive.
PORTUGAL CARALHO
Seriously impressive!
Meu Deus, um português na minha app de memes de linux???
Maybe they're Brazilian
The future the oil industry does not want people to know about.
I was told on Landman that wind power isn't reliable, doesn't last long enough, and requires oil to even work! Are you telling me a Taylor Sheridan show is US right wing propaganda?!
The best part was Cooper Norris trying to convince someone that solar power isn't worth it in Texas because you need sunny days. In Texas, where theres less than 70 days of rain in a year!
Crikey.
I live in the UK, we've had about 3 weeks of rain and clouds. Yet it's still worth having solars, etc, over here.
What I don't use during the summer is exported and credited, which helps pay some/most of the winter bills.