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Germany Sets New Solar Power Record
An anonymous reader sends this quote from a Reuters report:
"German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour — equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity — through the midday hours on Friday and Saturday, the head of a renewable energy think tank said. The German government decided to abandon nuclear power after the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year, closing eight plants immediately and shutting down the remaining nine by 2022. ... The record-breaking amount of solar power shows one of the world's leading industrial nations was able to meet a third of its electricity needs on a work day, Friday, and nearly half on Saturday when factories and offices were closed."
It's just gigawatts, not gigawatts per hour.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
What percentage is generated at midnight?
Midnight isn't the problem; power consumption is quite low then, and only drops more as the clock continues, only to start climbing well after dawn. Power generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure has to be built for peak, and that's the problem. Fortunately, a lot of the peak load is during daylight hours. A lot of it is also in the evening as well, but it's not about finding a magic bullet, it's about helping cut back on (not eliminate) the need to use coal or nuclear power.
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0 of course. That's when they're buying power from France's nukes though. Not to forget that they're already scrambling to find some way to subsidize all of this, because it cost too much taxpayer money. At the end of the day, the government is going off about how it'll pay all for itself, and the public is still left wondering where all the money is coming from, while the euro is tanking, and the economy looks like shit.
Om, nomnomnom...
Unless there is a way of storing the energy generated, the capacity of solar plants cannot be included in the calculation of capacity to meet peak demand. In other words, even if the solar at peak could meet all your needs, you still can't retire any of the old plants, because the solar capacity is useless when the sun isn't shining.
And by the way, hydrogen is not an energy source, it is an energy storage media... meaning it could very well be used to store solar energy.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Sorry to disappoint you - sentences exactly like this have been spewing from the nuclear industry since the decision. Coupled with many scenarios of doom that would happen as soon as the first nuclear power generators were disconnected. Coupled with how the power price would immediately increase (it fell since then, even though the industry tried to keep it up).
And you know what - nothing happened. Germany is happily exporting power (even to the french with all their nuclear power. Because on really hot and cold days they do not have enough capacity. Kind of funny when thinking about it ) - and there are even some gas power plants that are being abandoned because we still have too much capacity (they are not viable at the current power prices).
So - no, we are not screwed in the next long winter, we will not be needing french nuclear power and we certainly won't be seing rolling blackouts.
Working hours correlate well with sunlight in the summer, but winter is different - short days (less than 8 hours during winter solstice in my country (more north from Germany)) not much light during the days and everybody using more power (lighting) make solar power not practical in winter.
Talk to me in December when the sun is low on the horizon and there is a a major storm passing through Germany. How is that different than the quoted article?
1. Sun being lower produces less solar power.
2. Storms block most of the sun decreasing output of solar power plants
3. Snow accumulation can completely stop solar power production.
4. Winter causes higher demand for electrical heat.
5. Darker skies cause more use of lighting.
Taking the increased usage and decreased production into account power production from solar plants could easily drop from 1/3 or requirements to 5%. Instead of touting the optimal power output on a clear sky cool day they need to look at the worst case scenario. The issue with solar power is that you can not turn it on when you need it and that will never change.
As opposed to US politics, there is a consensus in German politics. Namely that politics is for the benefit of the people and society. Business is a part of that society, not the other way around.
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It's premature to say what the net effect will be. There are time when Germany has a net surplus and exports to France (because Russian natural gas is more expensive than surplus German electricity). There are also times when Germany imports French power because French nukes keep cranking out the power around the clock and their economy is in the tank compared to Germany's.
The German nuclear industry was subsidized by at least 80 billion EUR from 1956 to 2007 (and 3.7 billion in 2006 alone) based on extremely conservative estimates, but likely much more. A study commisioned by Greenpeace arrived at a number of 203.7 billion from 1950 to 2010. According to WP at least, http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernenergie#Deutschland
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Actually France has been struggling to meet peak demand with nuclear in recent years due to the hot summers we have been enjoying. Nuclear plants need to dump a lot of heat and when the ambient temperature gets too high they either have to drop to idle mode or dump hot water into lakes and streams, killing off the local wildlife and generally trashing the environment.
Of course this flaw does not mean nuclear is useless. I'm not a nuke-you-mentalist who writes off every other technology because it isn't perfect. However, this does highlight solar PV's strength - you get the most power when you need it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No, you're completely wrong. In fact, it's difficult to even parse what you're trying to say.
Yes, there are units called "kilowatt-hours". Really, that's just a kilowatt multiplied by an hour. The existence of such a unit has absolutely no bearing on this discussion, since we're talking about "gigawatts per hour". To put it in units more familiar to you, the phrase "miles per hour" makes perfect sense. But the phrase "mile-hours" is basically meaningless.*
A gigawatt per hour isn't a unit of "flow". It would be more akin to a unit of acceleration. If your power plant generates 5 GW/hr, then that would mean it starts off generating nothing, and after an hour its producing 5 GW, and after 2 hours it's producing 10 GW, and so on. That's clearly not what the summary is trying to suggest.
*Before anyone gets pedantic, yes, GW/hr and miles*hours and cubits*Rankine/Farads are all meaningful in the mathematical sense. But in the practical sense, they're meaningless.
People should also pay attention to the effect of energy prices: Germany has high electricity prices. If electricity is used for heat, it's in low-energy (well-insulated) houses and with heat pumps. France has cheap electricity. The pressure to use the electricity efficiently isn't there, so the French have much less insulated houses and resistive electric heating, which is less efficient than heat pumps, is ubiquitous. In cold winters, France has energy shortages, in spite of the numerous nuclear power plants. Their cheap electricity policy has caused a very seasonal energy need, for which nuclear power is far from ideal. To meet peak demand, they have to build so much capacity that they end up having to sell the surplus very cheaply most of the time.
Wait until we start 'subsidizing' the decommissioning of all those nuclear-waste producers...
For that money we could have reached 100% solar coverage. From the Sahara.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Sort of.
I'd rather say, Americans have got a strong commitment to the appearance of freedom, and thus, to implement most real world policies they have to jump through so many hoops that the resulting freedom is actually less than with a straight forward solution and costs more. And people are actually proud of that. I'd call it the "freedom theatre", akin to "security theatre".
"Ra ra" is not an argument, by the way, because by this logic USSR was certainly the best place to live (hint: it wasn't, even though there were some good things).
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The technology is here already, molten salt thermal storage.
We just need to build a utility grade facility to get the engineering challenges ironed out and to measure the real world performance of a full scale system.
Countries like Australia could be 100% solar with 24/7 electricity generation by coupling solar thermal concentrators with molten salt storage, by using some of the vast tracts of high sunshine hour desert land in the outback.
No, that would help solving the storage problem.
They also want their women to wear black blankets over their head in a sunny, hot climate, so I'm not sure what "Saudi Arabia wants" is worth considering.
Personally, I find what "German wants" more compelling than what "Saudi Arabia wants".
You are welcome on my lawn.
So how much is it when it is raining or cloudy?
It seems like 90% of this thread is arguing either for or against the notion that we shouldn't use solar power because it isn't always available. Rather than just mindlessly shouting about the relative price and reliability of solar vs. nuclear and the statistics about what times of day and times of year we have peak power usage, can we just examine this premise for a short moment?
We have a plentiful energy source which is sometimes (regularly) available to us. You are saying we shouldn't use it? Really? Your basis for that argument is that we can't use it all the time. This means we should never use it? I feel I must politely disagree with you there. Would you advise farmers not to grow seasonal vegetables because they cant grow them in winter? Would you advise people in a desert not to collect rainwater because it doesn't fall much in the desert? Would you advise me not to socialise with my friends because sometimes they have to work?
The article is about how an industrialised nation has demonstrated that it is economically and industrially feasible to harvest significant amounts of energy from the sun. Anyone want to talk about that? No? Well I do. I think this is great news. Good work everyone involved. Hopefully we can look forward to power bills going down in the future but what is money compared to the future habitability of the world? If a country like Germany can do this with the climate they have, this bodes very well for equatorial countries. Germany also has significant amounts of wind power, which also works at night and during the winter. Perhaps it would have been a better idea to start shutting down the coal plants first and the nuclear ones after. That debate on that has raged on this site for many pages, I myself am unsure about the answer. I want to see both phased out. Another important question is: How can we generate more clean, fuel independent energy? More solar farms and wind farms seem like a good idea. Geothermal and hydroelectric are nice for base load although hydro can be affected by weather as well. Osmotic power seems like an interesting variant, and Tesla's old idea of generating power from temperature gradients in the ocean seems worth a second look and maybe one day between the earths atmosphere and space, generation of electricity that is fuelled directly by global warming and works as a direct counter to it. I am getting too far into the possible future though now. The scientists have been doing good work though so far with solar and wind and I have every confidence in their abilities. Let's enjoy the good news for once, shilling for the nuclear power industry can wait till the next thread, and the next, and the next...
Let's enjoy the good news for once, shilling for the nuclear power industry can wait till the next thread, and the next, and the next...
I could have replied to one of a hundred threads here, but I happen to agree with 99% of what you say so this is probably a good place to complain without being seen as a whatever-shill. As intelligent as your reply was, it ended with just that implication. If you don't agree, then you are a shill. I happen to agree, so let's get that out of the way right now.
The summary quoted a Reuter's article as saying:
German solar power plants produced a world record 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour — equal to 20 nuclear power stations at full capacity
They don't go so far as to say it, but a very reasonable thing that someone may conclude from this is that 20 nuclear power stations are no longer necessary. Well, no matter how much I like renewable energy, I know that is wrong. You know that is wrong. But your average Joe Blow reading a newspaper sees that and *really does* think, "Wow, we can generate that much power. We don't need nuclear! Hurray!"
When you see others posting and saying, "Oh but what happens when the sun isn't shining." quite a few of them are intelligent people. They are responding to the implication that we no longer need 20 nuclear power plants.
They are being trolled. And they fell for it. On the opposite side, who *actually* believes that if we have, say, 30% base load generation from nuclear that we can simply switch them off because we had a day where we generated 30% of our need from solar? OK, there are some pretty ignorant people in the world, but I submit that they are rare around here. Nobody really believes that. So we get all huffy when people imply that we do.
And here's the saddest part: We've got one side calling the other essentially ignorant, tree-hugging bafoons and in response we call them evil, earth hating shills. All because some asshole at Reuters decided to troll the world in order to get eyeballs. I have seen some incredibly informative and insightful conversations on Slashdot. There are some incredibly smart people around here. But it is all nullified because we just bicker about... Solar providing 100% of our energy needs??? (Almost) Nobody believes that.
Maybe someone thinks nuclear is a good option for base load generation. Maybe someone thinks that we should prioritize research and development in other potential energy sources. There are points for and against each side. Reasonable people can argue about this. Each side can learn something useful from the other. But responding to these trolls just kills any ability to have a reasonable discussion. Calling the other side names does the same. Even imagining that there *is* another side is kind of crazy. We may differ on what method we prefer, but aren't we all interested in having electricity?
Very true. Here in Canada, people often rave about how we could be using solar power; they just don't get it. Solar power is not an efficient solution in Canada, wind power makes far more sense.
Berlin, Germany is further north than Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Calgary, Ottawa, Montreal, Halifax, Charlottetown, Fredricton, and Regina. Furthermore, each of these cities receives an average of 30% more solar energy than Berlin, some as high as 60% more. So, given that our populations live at roughly the same latitudes, and we have more area in which to deploy solar, and we get more sun, why would solar be okay for Germany, but not for Canada?
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