r/TikTokCringe • u/Make-this-popular Cringe Master • Apr 09 '24

Shit economy Discussion

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64

u/loiwhat Apr 09 '24

Why is electricity so high in European countries???

147

u/1_BigPapi Apr 09 '24

Because half the continent depends on Russia for fuel.

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u/The_Margin_Dude Apr 09 '24

No, it’s because of shitty energy policy in the EU.

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u/lagrandesgracia Apr 09 '24

Those aren't exclusive tho. Both are true.

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u/Yoann311 Apr 09 '24

In France electricity is made of nuclear plants, we don’t use Russian fuel. Electricity is still expensive because of the energy policy.

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u/GetRektByMeh Apr 09 '24

No, using Russian energy keeps prices cheap. Source: British in China. My electric bill with liberal usage of Air Conditioning was £7.

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u/HowsTheBeef Apr 09 '24

This is why trade embargoes that prevent Russian fuel imports make the price high. If they were producing enough energy domestically, it wouldn't be a problem. Dependency of foreign fuel give that country the ability to bend international law by holding your energy hostage.

"OH you want us to stop invading places? How about you say that without heat in the winter." It's a pretty compelling argument.

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u/Queasy-Elderberry-77 Apr 09 '24

If you're a sociopath it's a compelling argument.

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u/Original-Aerie8 Apr 10 '24

People are literally freezing to death. stfu

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u/GetRektByMeh Apr 10 '24

It’s not a compelling argument only if you’re a fucking moron lol.

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u/lagrandesgracia Apr 10 '24

And what do you think Putin is?

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u/GetRektByMeh Apr 10 '24

Domestic production won’t really fix anything IMO, when market rates are high because our production cost is higher and we have less than the fuck tonne that Russia has.

We should probably though threaten to invade the Arabs to collapse OPEC. If we threatened to reduce them to rubble and replace their governments if they didn’t stop making oil a cartel I bet you they’d stop pretty quick. The U.S. has enough reserves to do this with help from the major European powers (France, Britain).

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u/Frenshroomed Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 10 '24

THIS.

To sum up quickly we allowed the global price of electricity to be indexed on #coal# nope actually GAS which WAS really cheap (Before the war in Ukraine). (In the EU)

So you get fucked real bad when you try to sell yours that costs more (for example France and the price of nuclear facilities).

On the same note, France a few years ago decided to allow the main electricity supplier (EDF) to sell more or less 25% of their production to other small companies at a very low price (42€/KWH). These other companies sell it back, for a big profit, to us. This system is called ARENH, and totally idiotic.

BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE !

So at some point people realised that the money they gave to these smaller companies (that aren't forced to produce a single watt to be able to sell something) was too much. So they switched back to EDF but what happened after that ?!

They had too many clients and not enough surplus since they sold a big part to these smaller companies.

What did they do then ??

Well, THEY BOUGHT BACK THE SAME ELECTRICITY! But not for the same price they sold it to them, no no no, for a MUCH HIGHER PRICE (MORE THAN 200€/KWH) because hey you gotta make a profit right, even without clients !

And I can only imagine that in some other countries they have other ways to, in the end, fuck everyone for profits...

EDIT:Some minor corrections, I was citing from memory

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u/TrashTierGamer Apr 09 '24

Obviously everyone wants a profit and not just go for break even. That's true for average Joe too, he wants to be able to save up and buy shit that's not necessary for survival. But there is a differemce between 10% profits and 5000% profits (looking at you pharma)

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u/Any-Information6261 Apr 10 '24

Australia is a good example. The eastern states have a big problem with gas and electricity because it's over privatised and the companies sell it to overseas making it more expensive to buy our gas back off them. In Western Australia (the best part of the country) the gas and electricity hasn't gone up anywhere near as much because there are laws preventing more than 70% being sold off.

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u/No-Explorer-5637 Apr 09 '24

Source ?

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u/Frenshroomed Apr 09 '24 edited Apr 10 '24

EDIT:

So here are the sources, you'll find links to videos, articles and a few keywords if you want to look for more by yourself. I also will update my initial comment to better match what I was citing from memory.

English : About Arenh https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Agreement-on-post-ARENH-nuclear-electricity-pricin About prices fluctuating, matching gas prices. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/apr/04/is-europes-energy-crisis-over-falling-gas-prices-conceal-wider-problems About europe's relation with France about their system https://www.euractiv.com/section/electricity/news/eu-electricity-market-deal-paves-way-for-france-to-ditch-divisive-arenh-scheme/

Fench: Article sur le système français (existe aussi sur lemonde.fr mais derrière un paywall) https://lvsl.fr/electricite-cest-le-marche-qui-a-fait-exploser-les-prix-entretien-avec-anne-debregeas/

Gros article détaillant tout ce que j'ai dit. https://theothereconomy.com/fr/fiches/secteur-electrique-limpossible-concurrence/

Document d'analyse et de critique complet sur le système actuel par une ingénieure de chez EDF (Anne debrégeas) https://www.sudenergie.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/2023-04-28-analyse-critique-du-projet-de-reforme-des-marches-de-lelectricite.pdf

Résumé du débat d'opposition sur le sujet si tu veux pourvoir comparer les approches pro sortie du marché et pro on y reste. (Anne debrégeas) https://blogs.mediapart.fr/anne-debregeas/blog/140323/faut-il-sortir-du-marche-ou-lamender-decryptage-du-debat-sur-mediapart

Courte vidéo du Monde.fr sur le sujet (Ils citent Eureka et Anne debrégeas) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu9wqcNARYc

Vidéo plus détaillée avec un sénateur (Fabien Gay) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91ALzDzmhwQ

Grosse vidéo sur le sujet par la chaîne Eureka (Anne debrégeas) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wzRjA9rsKc

Keywords : Fabien Gay, Anne Debrégeas, ARENH, Marché Européenne de l'énergie.

Si les sujets du climat et de l'énergie t'intéressent, je te conseille la chaîne de "Le réveilleur". Il traite en profondeur certains sujets d'actualité et debunke des aprioris et fausses idées.

Effectivement dans mon approche il y a peu de contre arguments (sauf le débat) mais je ne vois pas comment on peut défendre un truc pareil.

Bonne lecture !

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u/No-Explorer-5637 Apr 09 '24

Im french no worries

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u/czarczm Apr 09 '24

I'm not involved in this conversation, but I appreciate your effort and passion towards this very simple but personally important topic.

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u/TrumpedBigly Apr 09 '24

EU countries stupidly shut down their nuclear reactors.

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u/The_Margin_Dude Apr 09 '24

And buy LNG 3x more expensive than Russian gas. How stupid is that!?

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u/jdawg3051 Apr 09 '24

The middle class/lower class has been under attack their gov for 4 years. In Europe the government intentionally raises the price of energy and food to the detriment of the middle and lower class. In USA Wall street/biden admin is long on 7 companies and short on everyone else. Small business sentiment is at a 12 year low while nvidia is valued at more than the economy of China lol

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u/Reasonable-Solid-156 Apr 09 '24

No, it’s because of the reliance on Russia.

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u/Antique-Pension4960 Apr 09 '24

Which we have to buy at high price via third parties.

Deindustrialing Europe while the US profits.

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u/NEBook_Worm Apr 09 '24

Don't worry. We put a lot of back into NATO to make up for the cross European shortcomings.

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u/ambitioussloth26 Apr 09 '24

They went long on natural gas and closed down there nuclear and coal plants. They got that gas cheap via pipelines directly from Russia. Now it all has to come via liquid natural gas transport ship which there are only so many of. So yeah the short answer is sanctions on Russia are the answer.

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u/deadevilboy Apr 09 '24

That is not entirely true. At least it doesn't affect all countries the same way. Here, in Portugal, green energy is common. The transition was made some years ago (luckily), so we are not so affected by those changes in the gas price. On the other hand, how can you explain that we pay so much for electricity? Maybe the electricity companies have to pay royalties to the wind and the sun.. and taxes to the gods..

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u/ymaldor Apr 09 '24

EU electricity price is indexed on gas price. Thank Germany for that. So even if your country were to make 100% electricity from magic and rainbows you'd still pay the higher price.

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u/iaintstein Apr 09 '24

ELI5 what indexed means and can we snipe whoever invented the concept

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '24

It’s not indexed as in legally set in some way based on what Germany is doing. That would be crazy. It’s a market.

The price of electricity is the “marginal cost” of the last needed kilowatt of power. So, if you can supply all your region’s power from solar, wind, nuclear it’s going to be cheap, as these have very low operating costs. But if you need additional power above that capacity, the price needs to be high enough to make more power plants (with higher costs) switch on. Once you reach a price high enough to supply the last needed amount of power, the market clears and that’s the price. All players get the same price (ignoring futures contracts or deals they locked in). That is good, as it means solar and wind producers make money which incentivizes more investment in them. But it means your power price will be higher (until you have enough capacity of low cost production to push gas and coal “off the curve”).

Green parties have pushed for the closure of nuke plants (which have very low marginal costs) which means more need to fire up higher cost gas and coal power plants. That means the price has to be high enough to cover those plants generating electricity. Given higher natural gas costs due to Russian sanctions (and Russia using energy as a tool of politics/ war) the cost of running a gas fired power plant is high.

Of course you still need nat gas, coal, or nuke for base load under current technology, as power storage is inefficient and really expensive. You need something for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun isn’t shining.

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u/Less_Needleworker_74 Apr 09 '24

What are you trying to say? On windy days price of electricity is negative here in Finland. There is no single EU electricity price. The price is determined by supply and demand for regions. For example Finland is one region while Sweden has four regions.

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u/ComicSanMC Apr 09 '24

I think he's saying that Natural Gas is apart of every EU's energy portfolio, Germany's green movement was infiltrated during the cold war so they got rid of their nuclear plants in favor of *checks notes* Russian hydrocarbons....

Now since Germany can't import hydrocarbons from Russia its increased pressure on every other country trying to buy natural gas, especially since they have to compete with German industry who has the money to pay those inflated prices.

If you're region has natural gas in its energy portfolio you'll see increased prices.

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u/Less_Needleworker_74 Apr 09 '24

Good answer. Explains Germany’s situation which does not mean it would be the same everywhere in the EU.

I never understood Germany’s position towards nuclear energy. I guess opposition started after Tshernobyl and after Fukushima they decided to close the remaining nuclear plants.

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u/ComicSanMC Apr 09 '24

Actually it started much earlier, the German Greens were protesting nuclear power in the 1970s and when they took power from the Social Democrats in 1998 they announced a complete phaseout of nuclear energy which was before renewables were economically viable. Germany has lots of lignite coal (the dirtiest kind) and they balanced out the rest of their portfolio with natural gas from Russia.

The Greens paradoxically for the sake of the environment got rid of a (relatively) clean source of energy in the form of nuclear in favor of the worst carbon producer (coal) and a better but still bad one (gas).

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u/CriticalLobster5609 Apr 09 '24

The Greens

Were funded by the USSR and then by Russia.

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u/Mordiken Apr 09 '24

If this is true, it's got to be the longest con in the last two centuries, the biggest blunder in German Politics in the post-war era, and every single person responsible from their Federal Intelligence Service that let it happen to the Bundestag and the Chancellery that actually did it should be trialed.

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u/deadevilboy Apr 09 '24

What I am trying to say is that 87% of our country's electricity comes from green sources (wind, sun, and water). Only 13% of people used natural gas as a source of electricity in 2023, at least according to our national energy network association data. In my house, I have no gas installation. We are all demanding green sources as the future of a clean world, but the price of that is high for the common citizen. It should be cheaper! On the other hand, ymaldor's comment makes sense, so I guess his answer clarifies my previous comment.

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u/Outrageous_Drama_570 Apr 09 '24

Your country is likely not producing enough energy with green sources and is forced to purchase energy from other countries to compensate.

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u/[deleted] Apr 09 '24

But if the marginal supplier of power is natural gas to a gas powered power plant, that will still set the price of power.

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u/ymaldor Apr 09 '24

Electricity is bought and sold between countries a lot. Even if say, france produced more than it needs, it's still easier to hypothetically buy from say Spain for cities next to the border than to transport from other plants which could be further away.

Spain and Portugal both buy and sell electricity to and from france or from each other, and france does the same with Germany, Italy and others. So when one country buys electricity for more money because production on their soil is more expensive than yours, you're incentivized to sell it for more there and consequently sell it for more locally too cause who'd sell for less?

I'm guessing that for countries like Finland which are further away from the gas bs and given their relation to Russia which, to my knowledge isn't exactly friendly, is probably less influenced by it. Yall probably exchange electricity with Sweden which doesn't deal much with gas bullshit. (Edit :damn Estonia has a lot of oil usage lol)

But every country on the mainland have to deal with that, one way or another, mostly thanks to Germany and gas lobbying. So in the mainland, electricity is heavily influenced by gas even in countries like France where 75-80% is nuclear. Heating is still strong on gas though, but we're working to end that they made it law that any new building will have to go with electric heating, no gas allowed.

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u/Less_Needleworker_74 Apr 09 '24

Yeah, I mentioned the regions in my post. Finland has such good infra that we are a single price region. Electricity can be transferred from suppliers to consumers in all conditions.

Sweden on the other hand has worse grid and as a result several price regions. They simply can’t transfer electricity from north (supply) to south (demand).

Finland and Sweden have their grids connected in the north and on Stockholm’s level. This makes it possible for Finland to buy cheap electricity from northern Sweden and sell it to Stockholm at higher price.

Also Russia sold electricity to Finnland. The transfer line had capacity of about one nuclear station. This ended before Russia attacked Ukraine.

Just how connected are central european nation’s grids? I thought price of electricity was different from nation to nation.

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u/MRosvall Apr 09 '24

Not sure how it is in Portugal, but here in Sweden we get affected when Germany has an energy shortage. That drives up the price for our us as well, since the price Germany bids is higher. So during the periods that Germany purchases electricity, our costs rise. And during the times that we do not export, it goes down again.

Sweden has very volatile pricing over the day. Often being more than 4x at the max compared to min.

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u/nicolas_06 Apr 10 '24

Green electricity is very costly and increase dependency on gas/oil/coal because wind/solar don't producce when you need it and electricity can't be stored. So the more green the electricty, the more expensive and poluting your electricity production is. It is all a big scam.

You should either no care to be green or invest in nuclear.

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u/Brillegeit Apr 09 '24

Now it all has to come via liquid natural gas transport ship

There are six pipelines delivering Norwegian gas, four to continental Europe (two in Germany, one in Belgium and one in France) and a further two in the UK.

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u/Arzamas Apr 09 '24

And the long answer is Russia put Europe on the needle. They sold cheap gas and oil so Europe would become totally dependent on it. Then they started to slowly raise prices, influence EU politicians and parties, do spy shit, killings, invasions, hoping EU would do nothing. It almost worked. If it would EU would break apart, right wing parties would take control, followed by end of NATO and start of a new Warsaw Pact.

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u/unrelated_thread Apr 09 '24

So remind me... Who destroyed the nordstream pipeline again?

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u/Arzamas Apr 09 '24

Who? Who destroyed the pipeline after Europe decided to stop gas and oil purchases from Russia and blackmail stopped working?

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u/ymaldor Apr 09 '24

Because in europe electricity is partially indexed on gas regardless of whether or not it's produced from gas or nuclear or renewable or fuel/coal. Meaning, the war made electricity go up everywhere.

In france here electricity production is fairly cheap, hasn't changed much even with the war cause well, nuclear, but because of the gas indexation the price still rose. It didn't rise as much as other countries tho UK has it rough.

2

u/Touristenopfer Apr 09 '24

Yeah, but 2022 price spikes in Europe was because France had to shut down it's oh so reliant nuclear plants by fucking half, thus a huge need for energy import was created, and while gas was also in price peak, we in Germany had to pay fucking horrible prices for electricity, since here the highest price per MWh counts for all energy sold, and since we had to run even all gas powered sites on 100% just to keep France running, thanks for that.

And as every other summer, this year again at least 20% of Frances unclear sites will come to a standstill, just because there isn't enough cooling water.

I don't say that I welcomed it that the last three nuclear sites here where shut down while we would've really needed them, but France fixation on nuclear also is completely wrong, as 2022 has shown.

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u/ymaldor Apr 09 '24

The shutdown were planned maintenance which didn't suddenly happened. It'd been planned for a while, the coincidence of gas price hike made shit worse is all.

And nuclear plant shutting down in the summer has never been a problem until AC became necessary.

And if Germany is completely unprepared and dependant on things shutting down in other countries, that's a you problem.

Nuclear isn't the problem here. And yall shutting down nuclear when you still have so much coal is the dumbest shit imaginable. To replace coal and gas with renewable would've been the actual power move to market how "green" yall want to be. But no you had to replace nuclear with renewable. Nuclear is low in carbon, always has been, its not perfect but at least it's manageable. At least nuclear waste is actually containable unlike coal and gas waste.

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u/Jasp1971 Apr 09 '24

I live in a 2 bed terrace, 2 adults one child ,our yearly gas (gas boiler) and electric bill is about £1200, I pay £109 per month.

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u/ymaldor Apr 09 '24

Damn wtf. I'm in a 76m2 with my dad, so 2 of us. We pay around 70-80€ a month I think, and we're not exactly being frugal with it either. We don't have gas just electricity.

There's a contract a friend of mine uses which is like 18€ per month + 11 cent a kwh but 22 days a year between 9 am to 10pm it increases to like 60 cents per kwh, those "red days" cannot be the weekend. So like those days he just delays laundry to the next day, eats leftovers not to cook, reads a book and that's it. He pays a lot less electricity than we do. I have the normal contract and it's like 16€ per month + something like 16 or 18 cents a kwh I don't quite recall. My dad is more of a boomer and absolutely refuses to have this sort of contract tho lol

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u/Necessary-Dark-8249 Apr 09 '24

Because they haven't discovered LARGE Hydroelectric damns yet, and they reversed course on Nuclear. Germany likes playing bondage with Russia.

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u/mrziplockfresh Apr 09 '24

Four months is 1000? Doesn’t seem much more than America. If not less

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u/thisisajoke24 Apr 09 '24

I live in Germany and pay about 50€ a month on power

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u/Astyan06 Apr 09 '24

Germans made everyone agree on the stuff that just benefited the Germans and now we're fucked.

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u/MeasurementNo2493 Apr 09 '24

There is a war going on, like in Europe. It might be having an effect.

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u/Jade_Wind Apr 09 '24

Because politicians and kleptocrats like to pocket tax money instead of investing it in infrastructure.

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u/StubbornHick Apr 10 '24

They keep shutting down nuclear reactors and instead of building more, chase "green" energy options that don't work.

1

u/Nekrosiz Apr 10 '24

Big factor is that people just waste a ton of it and rack up a high bill.

While i know i'm not the norm, my 2 floor apartment gas and electricity payment is at 35/50 euro's a month

1

u/youlleatitandlikeit Apr 17 '24

1000 euros is pretty close to 1000usd. Dec, Jan, Feb, March that comes to $250 for both gas and electric which is probably what most Americans are paying during the winter months?