Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

And for the numbers it seems obvious that renewables are a fundamental part of the picture.

If you have a steel mill for example you need to be able to basically guarantee a certain level of energy production to run it viably because the risk of there not being any power during adverse weather is enough to make it unviable (you can't just turn these things off). This is the reason why gas and nuclear probably aren't going away (or at least shouldn't).

Probably when combined with batteries it is half the price.

There are some colder areas in northern europe especially where solar doesnt work as well but they also tend to be better served for hydro (which can also store power).

In most places, if you buy more of something, you are a good customer, it is usually more economical to sell to you and you get a discount.

In california people who use more kilowatts, pay more.

regardless of inflamed speeches eu simply cannot operate without that energy. should have thought about that before starting a war with russia. best of lucks!

1. Stable power grids are much easier with a mix of generation sources that includes substantial rotating mass and baseload generators.

2. Nuclear is awesome from a climate change and energy security point of view, and it would be amazing if it were cheaper or more valued.

When power was primarily generated by thermal plants with big rotating masses, we got frequency control implicitly from the inertia of those generators. When there was a demand spike, the generators handled the millisecond to few seconds regime just by their inertia, while the seconds to minutes regime was handled by plant control systems increasing throttles or starting more peaker plants.

I disagree that renewables themselves are the problem. Cheap solar energy does not have to mean that we shut down all the uneconomical generation sources, nor does it mean that we cannot do FCAS with modern technology.

Battery electric storage systems have actually eaten much of the FCAS market in the USA, where they can respond way more effectively and efficiently than other systems in the 1 to 10 second regime. By and large, we don't store solar energy for use overnight - we store it (or really any energy) for use in smoothing short demand spikes.

I would love to see more nuclear, and more advanced nuclear. Modern designs are safe, effective, and amazingly capable. They just aren't as cheap as paving the world with solar cells or burning natural gas left over as a fracking byproduct.

They don't _actually_ want nuclear, luckily it's just lip service. Because it doesn't solve the problem surfaced by the US-Israel-Iran war: You'd still be dependent on other countries for your (nuclear) fuel needs.

That was not a stabilization problem per-se, but the companies that had to do the stabilization just didn't although the were being paid for that. Please read the final report.

  However, several officials and energy experts have rejected the idea that renewables are to blame. EU energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, stated that there was "nothing unusual" about the electricity mix at the time of the blackout, and that the outage was not due to a "specific source energy". [1]