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[return to "Electricity prices in France turn negative as renewable energy floods the grid"]
1. Ecomme+1f[view] [source] 2024-06-18 19:13:50
>>Capsta+(OP)
What I never understood was how France gets 70-75% of their electricity from Nuclear, yet their energy prices aren't "too cheap to meter", and while cheaper than their neighbors, don't really raise any eyebrows. Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?
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2. hn_thr+9h[view] [source] 2024-06-18 19:27:54
>>Ecomme+1f
> Wouldn't this be a major example of why Nuclear is NOT the future?

Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

The issue is that nuclear is currently the only reliable base load generation technology that doesn't produce carbon (except perhaps hydro for reasonable definitions of "reliable"). The other top technologies either produce carbon (natural gas and coal) or are unreliable (solar and wind).

I actually don't believe nuclear is "the future" because I think renewables + battery storage will be more economical going forward and less politically dicey. But France is currently the envy of the world for their energy generation save for some countries with unique environments that allow for a lot of carbon-free generation (e.g. Norway with hydro and Iceland with geothermal).

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3. throw0+zj[view] [source] 2024-06-18 19:41:58
>>hn_thr+9h
> Not at all. Nobody has really put forth "too cheap to meter" as a rationale for nuclear for 50 years or more.

A history of the phrase, which was originally said in 1954 (seventy years ago):

> Only a few days later, Strauss was a guest on Meet the Press. When the reporters asked him about the quotation and the viability of "commercial power from atomic piles," Strauss replied that he expected his children and grandchildren would have power "too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered."[4]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_cheap_to_meter

It was never meant to be taken as $0:

For a long time water was paid for in a flat rate, and one could certainly envisage where electricity was the same: the power company would pick some kind of median/average to charge folks.. Of course most folks have metered water/sewage nowadays, and so metered electricity is less strange.

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