For reference, the price for fixed-cost plans is around 10c/kWh.

As someone who’s been constantly running an electric heater in the garage while painting my car, I was quite lucky with the timing.

It’s not literally free, though. Transfer prices are fixed, and there are taxes and some other minor costs associated with it, so where I live, it still adds up to around 6c/kWh even when the price drops to zero. The cheap prices are due to an excess of wind power, but once the wind dies down, prices usually spike hard.

  • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeOPEnglish
    64·
    2 months ago

    I have nothing against nuclear energy personally. I wish we’d build more of it. Currently about 2/5th is wind power, 2/5th nuclear and 1/5 hydro. When there’s no wind and it’s cold outside we see prices in the 30 - 70c/kWh which is insanely expensive. If we had huge storage capacity and much, much more wind turbines then maybe it could work.

    • zergtoshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      54·
      2 months ago

      Compared to fossil fuels I tend to prefer nuclear as well, because even though mining uranium has quite some ecological impact including emitting carbon emissions, running a nuclear power plant doesn’t have carbon emissions and that’s important.
      What worries me is that there are nuclear power plants around the world and despite the first nuclear power plant having been built 70 years ago, not a single ultimate disposal place for the radioactive waste has been found/created.
      Having “cheap” electric energy for 3-4 generations and putting a burden on the next 40,000 generations just does sound like a bad deal to me.
      Until we have more wind and hydro, keeping nuclear running might be a price we have to pay.
      Not being able to dispose of some more (thousands of) tons of radioactive waste is making the problem only quantitatively worse and not qualitatively.

      • ContrarianTrail@lemm.eeOPEnglish
        72·
        2 months ago

        not a single ultimate disposal place for the radioactive waste has been found/created.

        Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository

        Also something to keep in mind is that high level waste which is the spent fuel is only about 3 - 5% of the total radioactive waste from nuclear power plants. Majority of the waste has way lower levels of radiation and it’s things like reactor parts and safety equipment.

        • zergtoshi@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          I stand corrected regarding ultimate disposal and apparently they are planning to use it in a clever way.
          Thank you for letting me know!