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Germany Produces Record-Breaking 5.1 Terawatt Hours of Solar Energy In One Month
oritonic1 writes "Germany is rapidly developing a tradition of shattering its own renewable energy goals and leaving the rest of the world in the dust. This past July was no exception, as the nation produced 5.1 TWh of solar power (PDF), beating not only its own solar production record, but also eclipsing the record 5TWh of wind power produced by German turbines in January. Renewables are doing so well, in fact, that one of Germany's biggest utilities is threatening to migrate to Turkey."
This can't be right, solar doesn't work, Germany is too far north, the lights must go off every night, PV is a stupid technology, nuclear is the only way!!1 How can this be happening, it must be a liberal media lie put out by the scientifically illiterate eco-nazis... it... it just can't...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Yeah, it could power 4214 trips!
But Germany gets so much more sun than the US! We can't compete with that?!
(I wish I were kidding...)
[End Of Line]
with cheaper solar panels and more efficient too. I think there will be a point in the future where no house is build without solar panels.
I don't like the greens too much but on days like this I'm happy that they do have as much political influence as they do.
"...that one of Germany's biggest utilities is threatening to migrate to Turkey."
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.
Not to burst your conspiracy theory, but oil companies aren't opposed to solar. Solar cars, yes, but they don't lose everything from reduced coal burning. Some oil companies actively invest in alternative energy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Discussion of technological breakthroughs is meaningless without a discussion of the cost.
We have the technological capacity to build a hotel on the moon and run flights daily. We don't have the means to do it on an even remotely economically reasonable basis.
And in discussing costs, I mean real costs. Subsidies to the renewable energies and penalties/fees to the fossil fuel based energies are distortions to the economic picture and must be excluded for an honest discussion on the topic. Here in California I saw a state sponsored study that attempted to prove that recycling plastic bottles was more economic than treating them as trash. I actually read the study and what I found is that the authors allowed subsidies to be included in the revenues of the recycling agencies and extra fees charged to landfills (and related) to be counted in the costs of the trash side. Naturally if your agenda is recycling and you have regulatory control over the revenues and costs... you're studying your ability to exercise power: not the economics behind an industry.
Just nationalize the plants that are being shut down and keep them running only as long as necessary. Oh wait... Maybe the banks won't like that, and we don't want to offend them.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Obviously there are subsidies to encourage buying solar panels. However, whats really burning the utilities is how the pricing is worked out in Germany. The utilities have to pay top tier price for small scale solar power (ie if you have solar panels on your roof, generating an excess). The way the ends up working is that each kilowatt hour your neighbors put into the grid, the more you have to pay to pull power from the grid. More solar power drives the price up.
I don't see how this can last long term. California has a much more common sense approach - equal pricing. The utilities have to pay you back equal to what you would pay.
Most other US states, the utilities can pay you back less than they charge you.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
a single nuclear plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Plant) produces 38 Twh or about 7.5 times more than ALL of Germany's solar power! Don't get me wrong, I think renewables are amazing but the numbers look impressive until you compare them to how the world really powers itself...renewables have a LONG way to go.
But at what cost?
Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.
So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.
"His name was James Damore."
Perhaps I should RTFA, but looking at the Wikipedia page on Energy_in_Germany, that looks to be about 10% of monthly electricity consumption, (generously, given that it's summer), and less than 2% of total energy consumption.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
Not so. BP mothballs solar technology that competes. I know this firsthand-lost my job at BP research right after we achieved solar efficiencies that were competitive with oil. They only invest so they can own/sit on the technology and prevent commercialization
I'm not so sure about your plan to let ~150 W / sq. m the sun is beaming down here all day be completely wasted forever, either.
.: Semper Absurda
They told you the real story here. The solar and wind guys are getting huge government subsidies and tax breaks. Where as the coal and nuclear providers have to pay all sorts of fees, extra taxes, and of course regular taxes.
So guess who is being more profitable?
You can crush any business by doing that. Anything. You could make growing rice in Antarctica viable doing that. Just offer a big enough subsidy for every ton of rice grown there. Boom. Profit.
The question is can the german government sustain these subsidies indefinitely. As in forever. And if/when they stop providing them what will happen to their renewable programs?
I live in California. We've gone through many renewable programs going back to the 1970s. This has been our experience.
First, we give the renewable company a lot of money.
Second, they build their plant.
Third, we give them big tax breaks for subsidies which last for five to ten years.
Fourth, they operate for five to ten years.
Fifth, the subsidies stop.
Sixth, the renewable power company dies almost instantly.
Seventh, the power station is left abandoned in the desert to rot. There isn't even enough money left after to tear it down. Our deserts are littered with these power plants. Dozens of them. Every time one closes we tend to start up another one. And another ruin is in the making.
I want renewable energy. But I want it to be self supporting.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
"In 2006 the plant produced 38.14 TWh". In a full year. The 5.1 TWh of solar power was for a single month.
Renewables still have a long way to go, but it's 12 times better than you think. :)
Does this mean that Godzilla will immigrate to Germany, because they have more power lines to walk through? With 5.1twh of electric power, how can he resist the temptation? How can Japan possibly compete, with their Nuclear plants mostly shut down?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I can't see Turkey putting out more energy than coal or natural gas. Surely it wouldn't be any cheaper, or cleaner, to burn Turkey than what they are using now.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Germany uses on the order of 4,000 TWw per year. 5 TWh in the peak solar month... still a long ways to go. Then again, Germany sticks other countrys with over half of its energy needs.
The Forbes article states "Under current regulations, electricity generated by renewable energy resources are given priority access to the grid. As a result, electricity generated by coal and gas-fired plants is only used “to make up for any shortfalls,” according to the AFP."
Does this mean that the nuclear stations have to divert their power when the wind picks up or the sun comes out? I'm certainly no expert, but I thought in the US it is the opposite, so that the wind stations have to go on bypass and the dams/nuclear stations have priority. Or is the Forbes article simply incorrect?
That is the problem. Notice that conventional electricity generation is used when there is not enough green power produced. Storms that would over speed wind power and block most of the solar power happen quite often and could drop green power generation drastically. During those times convention power plants need to be available. If they are not profitable then they will not be available and brownouts and blackouts will occur due to lack of power. The problem with green power is not generation; it is storage so it can be used when needed and not just when produced. Sure there are some technologies available but they are not widely used. More money needs to go into the storage issue.
Germany's electricity prices are about the same as California's.
Residents in Germany are paying ~$0.35/kWh while residents in Californian are paying ~$0.16/kWh, and California isnt a good example of efficiency either.
In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.
But lets not let facts get in the way of a good P.R. piece about solar power, right?
"His name was James Damore."
It's certainly a huge expense... but on the positive side they're joining the Chinese, the Australians etc... to claw back a couple of percent of global carbon and finance the development of solar technology - the price of panels etc. has halved and halved again. There are also advantages to relying less on foreign energy or so I hear. The Germans can free-ride on the US waste on the military, and the US can free-ride on the German waste on solar/wind etc... development. Sounds fair to me.
According to the Fossel Fuel lobby in the UK, solar and wind isn't economical, drives up the cost of electricity and gas and is bad for the environment, the money should be given on the Fossel Fuel companies instead ..
Why is Wind power so expensive? An economic analysis
Npower delivers clarity on the changing cost of energy
AccountKiller
I'm not so sure about your plan to let ~150 W / sq. m the sun is beaming down here all day be completely wasted forever, either.
If Germany was having some sort of electricity shortage crisis where they just couldn't build any more power plants of any kind, you might have a point.
In reality there are more efficient ways to generate electricity, there are places to do it, and there is fuel to do so. No real shortage at all. They are forcing by mandate that their residents pay more than necessary for electricity. Inefficiency. Look up the definition.
"His name was James Damore."
The US produces %0.11 of our electricity via solar. just over 2 TWh (source [PDF]). We have how much landmass and we don't even come close to Germany's output. Depressing... I'm curious to know what programs Germany has in place to support adoption of solar and wind energy production. Although it would likely never happen, it would be nice if we could replicate some of that here, in the more weather-stable parts of the country. Even better if we could have some decent mass storage solutions to allow solar to really support the whole grid on a larger scale (as opposed to locally).
BOOP!
"Oh, the solar power haters* are going to love this oneâ"a recent study by Germanyâ(TM)s Institute for Future Energy Systems (IZES), conducted on behalf of of the German Solar Industry Association (BSW-Solar), has found that, on average, solar power has reduced the price of electricity 10% in Germany (on the EPEX exchange). It reduces prices up to 40% in the early afternoon, when electricity demand is peaking and electricity typically costs the most. Thereâ(TM)s a visual of that (in German) here:" link
AccountKiller
Any mention of solar or any other renewable energy on Slashdot brings out an army of trolls, dolts, nincompoops and people who haven't commented on a story in ages, but suddenly have a pressing need to hold forth on solar energy. People who say, "It takes 7TW just to build a goddamn solar panel!" or, "Solar's no good because it's only 10%, and since coal is 30%, then that means coal is better because clouds!!" as if we'd passed the limits of technology in the 1890's and had better just get used to what we've got. I don't know what motivates people, or what brings them out for these stories, but it's pretty clear that if there is a concerted corporate effort to spread disinformation about energy, it's definitely working.
The same people who will discuss seriously the best type of deep space drive for a manned mission to the Cygnus constellation will aver with absolute certainty that solar energy is just a pie-in-the-sky pipe dream.
If I was a sociologist, I'd study the phenomenon. But that would just depress me.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... in spain they tax us extra for renewable energy, because otherwise it would be "unfair" to the industry...
$ perl -e 'printf "%.3f DeLoreans\n", 5.1e12 / 1.21e9'
4214.876 DeLoreans
The chart says that there is 34.558 GW of solar capacity installed. They then show that 19.4Twh of energy was produced in the first seven months. Lets do some math. The longest day in Frankfurt is 16 hours and 23 minutes while the shortest day is 8 hours and 3 minutes. Therefore, on average the sun is up for 12 hours.19400Gwh / 7 months / 30 days / 12 hours = 7.4 Mw produced on average. That is 22% of capacity. That would mean that when the sun is up solar plants are producing, on average, 22% of their installed capacity. What happened to the other 78%?
Lets do the same calculation for wind power. 24200 TWh /7 months/ 30 days / 24 hours = 4.8 Mw. 4.8/30.533 = 16% (wind works after dark so not daylight adjustment). Where is the other 84% of capacity.
Here are the numbers from the chart on page 4:
Electricity production: first seven months 2013
Uranium -- 52.1 TWh
Brown Coal -- 85.1 TWh
Hard Coal -- 65.5 TWh
Gas -- 23.8 TWh
Wind -- 24.2 TWh
Solar -- 19.4 TWh
Run of River -- 10.5 TWh
Total energy production was about 280.6 TWh, renewable was 54.1 TWh (or about 19.3% of all energy production).
Also interesting is the chart on page 9, "Monthly Production Solar". It is a bar graph, so these numbers are mostly my eyeball estimates:
January: 0.35 TWh (exact number)
February: 0.6 TWh (my estimate)
March: 2.3 TWh (my estimate)
April: 3.1 TWh (my estimate)
May: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
June: 4.3 TWh (my estimate)
July: 5.1 TWh (exact number)
So winter really is bad for solar in Germany, but other months it isn't bad. Interestingly, wind does better in Winter... chart on page 10, "Monthly Production Wind", same deal as above (mostly eyeball estimates with two exact numbers):
January: 5.0 TWh (exact number)
February: 3.2 TWh (my estimate)
March: 4.7 TWh (my estimate)
April: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
May: 2.8 TWh (my estimate)
June: 3.3 TWh (my estimate)
July: 1.7 TWh (exact number)
It doesn't look like renewables will be able to produce 100% of power needs any time soon in Germany, but they are producing about 1/5 of all energy. More than I expected.
Critics claim that Germany is paying six times as much for power, to finance all the renewables. (Per that article, 18 billion Euros paid on power that has a market value of 3 billion Euros) See also the Wikipedia article on Renewable energy in Germany.
Presumably though this is an investment and the renewables will keep providing power once their costs have been paid fully. I'm wondering if, over the operational lifetime of the solar and wind power equipment, they will wind up producing enough power that they will have actually been a good investment?
IMHO it would make more sense for them to keep the nuclear power plants and try to shut down coal plants, but that's not their plan.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Since the sky seems to fall quite often, maybe we should build skyfall power plants.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
On page 22 of the report it states that 1.32 TWh were produced in calendar week 29. According to page 3 there are 34.558 GW of installed capacity. Lets do some math; 13200/7/16= 11.8. That is 34% of capacity.
Take a look at page 71 of the report. Notice that as solar becomes more prevalent there is more electricity being imported.at dawn and dusk and more surplus exported around noon. What if every country tried to do that? There would be shortages at dawn and dusk and massive surpluses at noon. This is why I say that electricity generation is not the problem; electricity storage is.
When do the patents expire on your project?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The 900 lb gorilla in the room is the shutdown of nuclear generation. This is causing a much faster increase in coal consumption and construction of more coal burning plants in Europe.
A lot of what is being mined and burned is nasty brown stuff too.
The idea is that it's going to be replaced by renewables. Someday maybe, but I bet not in my lifetime. The upshot is that despite all this solar etc. the EU is spewing more CO2 than ever.
The Economist has a great article about it. They call it the 'Golden Age of Coal'.
It's a safe bet that, if true, it wasn't patented, actually... since patents would require public disclosure.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm paying roughly $0.105/kWh here in Texas where the energy produced is only from 8% renewable (per the EFL). When I was on a 100% renewable wind contract, think I was paying $0.123/kWh hour. Of course, the actual power generation isn't really distributed to my home. But it is being used in place of fossil fuels somewhere else on the grid.
Ever since Texas had deregulated markets where the resident could chose from REPs, prices got cheaper. The trick is to keep jumping from REP to REP after each contract expires. Otherwise, you will fall back to market value prices (inflated) and the current REP won't offer you the same deal that it does for new customers. So again, to save money expect to jump from REP to REP each year. It's a painless process really. They just make shitloads of money off people too lazy or complacent in paying the bill without really paying attention. FYI, I jumped from Tara Energy to TXU. I've heard bad things about TXU, but the deal was too good to pass up. After this contract is up, I'll be jumping ship again. I recommend Tera Energy by the way. I would have stayed with them had they offered me a better deal on contract renewal, but they were too late in continued negotiations as I already signed up with TXU, but I digress.
http://www.powertochoose.org/
Life is not for the lazy.
Word of advise. If you can, time your contract renewals to not occur in the summer time. That's when prices are the highest. Or else you will be locked in high rates for the rest of the year. You'll have to do the math, but it might pay off going with a three month contract, ride out the summer, and renew in the fall for a new 12 month contract when prices have come down again.
Life is not for the lazy.
Yes, and who was the fool that put a nuke plant in a coastal tsunami prone part of the world. The problem isn't nuclear. The problem is the fuel. Uranium style reactors were developed as a kinda afterbirth of the manhattan project. Uranium plants can produce plutonium needed for the bomb. The soviets just took a further approach and made all their reactors, the RBMK series, produce plutonium as a direct byproduct of fission chain reaction. With a high void coefficient and poor management we saw what happens with being careless with nuke plants did in 1986 and the power of location in fukishima. However the gates foundation is funding research into thorium based reactors. Very much safer and if something were to happen, the by products have very short half lives and don't have the bio consequences of Cesium 137 and Strontium 90. Fusion isn't around but probably because it keeps getting defunded. They thought fission was impossible too at one point.
The problem isn't the technology, the problem is the fuel. But then again listening to the far left on energy works all the time. Too bad Solyndra isn't around to sell to Germany. Not that the right is even better. Oh wait... this is slashdot.
They could have patented them under a completely independant shell company. Just because you did the research doesn't mean you have to be the one to patent it, especially if you are just trying to stop other research.
Look up a few definitions yourself. Like, "externality". Solar power absolutely is worth paying more for, if it saves more in environmental damage than its costs, relative to coal. I think it does. What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.
Even without that, what is the cost to our health from pollution from coal burning? Priceless. I visited London in 1985. One shocker I got was a day after I arrived, when I blew my nose. The white tissue turned black. I hear that London is much cleaner today.
Solar may cost more up front, but is cheaper over the long haul. Solar will continue to improve.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What's more likely, that BP has secret technology that it hid in patents through a shell company, or that an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot is lying?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
right after we achieved solar efficiencies that were competitive with oil.
Competitive with oil? What were you going to do, put solar panels on car roofs? Hint: that's not going to work even with 100% efficiency.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ah yes, crony capitalism. Like all of the cronies who have collected the ~$10T we've pissed away over the past decade on such national treasures as our multiple ongoing wars, an unmatched prison-industrial complex, corporate welfare and bailouts for billionaires, and national defense and security. A hefty price tag, but I guess we did get a lot for our money. We got a new surveillance state, militarized police forces, dismantling of the constitution, and a recession bordering on depression while the elite have never been richer or contributed less. Let's also not forget that we nailed down the #1 spot on the Incarceration Rate Hot 100 (not to mention the #1 spot on many other prestigious charts), and as a bonus, our global resentment is at an all time high!
But I hear you, let's focus on the negative waste like green energy subsidies that cost less than what is filtered to war profiteers every month to keep Operation Occupy Afghanistan running indefinitely. We should also probably bitch about even thinking about providing healthcare to our citizens, and don't even get me started on those leeching retirees who demand a monthly cash handout just because they worked their whole lives paying into social security. What a waste.
Can't 50MW run a decent sized city and a couple GW run a small country or US state? This is 5 TW of just solar? That's 5 million megawatts. There's just no way unless they covered their entire country in solar panels.
They might be filed by a different company, but patents themselves still would have to be publicly disclosed. Filing them under a different company name might make them harder to explicitly search for, but not any less publicly available, and so there'd almost automatically be more people that would know about it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I pay about $0.27/kWh in NYC for what's that's worth...
What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.
We dont even know the sign of this value, yet you say its easily trillions. It might easily be trillions in benefit, rather than cost, and thats also presuming the projections are at all accurate which is well below 100% confidence.
But of course you seem to think that you know the optimal temperature of the earth and that its less than the current temperature, so why wouldnt you also be 100% confident about the projections....
Stop pedaling your religion to people with more knowledge than you about the state of knowledge of the climate scientists. Seriously. You just look like a parrot selling a story when you make such egregious errors about knowledge that even the IPCC admits isnt known.
"His name was James Damore."
Gosh!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Some more info - I am a German living in Germany, and I've been following non-mainstream media on this very topic for quite a while.
Solar and wind are exploding, much quicker than anyone expected. In fact, so quickly that it has the government in panic, probably courtesy of the big energy corporations. You see, most solar and wind power is decentralized, deployed in small batches by thousands of small companies or private owners. The plans for big off-shore wind parks are moving ahead much, much more slowly.
So, the government broke their own promises, retro-actively(!!!) changed the law and reduced the subsidies for clean energy. When you read "subsidies" you should realize that both coal and nuclear are also heavily subsidized. With the recent changes, more so then renewable energy.
In addition, a law that exempts the really huge energy users in the industry was massively expanded and these days most energy-heavy industrial users are exempt from energy taxes. This makes electrical power a lot cheaper for them then for the consumer, who of course needs to pay for the difference. The purpose of this is obviously to reduce public support for renewable energy, because it has all been accompanied by a massive PR campaign about rising energy costs.
The fact is that the actual price of electricity has come down. If you look at the power exchange (like a stock exchange, just for energy prices), there were days when the price of electrical power was negative for several hours. Yes, that's right, there was so much energy being produced that the producers paid you for taking it off their hands. Sounds insane, isn't - electrical energy can't be stored easily, and you can't just make it vanish. If supply and demand aren't in balance, the stability of the energy network is in danger.
Of course, private consumers didn't notice and weren't given cheap energy. See above.
There's a massive political tug-of-war going on within Germany right now. On the one hand there are hundreds of mostly small or medium-sized companies that are driving the renewable energy market, building and installing wind turbines and solar panels. On the other hand are about half a dozen big old energy-power companies who simply missed the boat and are still heavily invested into coal and nuclear. There's a whole story there about the Germany government's flip-flopping on nuclear power over the years, too much to include in this post.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
P.S. - apart from the above, there have been laws put in place, forcing communities to use a certain percentage of their land for renewable energy production. Neat idea as such, but depending of the area, this causes some problems ... e.g., the area I live in has large woods, moderate farming and cities in the range of 30-60k people (core cities). According the scientific research, there aren't many places for wind energy production, and the only ones that come even close to a break-even point for production are naturally on hills/higher plains. Which - not very surprisingly - aren't where the cities or farming is, but the dense woods. In order to fulfill the required ratio of renewable energy areas, the generators need to be placed in the middle of the woods, destroying not only the rather large space of woodland around the generators, but also requiring infrastructure (wider asphalt roads), power lines, and causing additional damage to the fauna by constant noise and infrasound ... also we're talking not about some small windmill, but 600+ft high ones, with 400ft diameter rotors ... to add to that, our local government decided to sign a contract with a company for them to build the generators even before any results of the surveys were done, or before involving (or even telling) the community about it ... therefore, if the local people should successfully stop the project either through political pressure or legal channels, the community is probably liable for damages claims from that company ... ...
And then politicians wonder why people are fed up with politics
"I'm sure in the future you can just generate nineteen point twenty one jiggawatts from a windmill, but in the 1950s it's a little hard to do."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It is a great project and I am all for it. They are trying but need investment and that is hard to come by because most investors are interested in production and not storage.
By the way did you notice that the efficiency of the two existing compressed air plants are 42 and 54%. That would mean that the daytime rate would have to be about twice the night time rate to break even. That does not take into account the costs for running and maintaining the compression plant. with that taken into account the night time rate would have to be 1/3 the daytime rate. That is not going to happen any time soon.
Finally, Germany does not have separate day/night rates.
According to this electricity prices have risen 61% since 2000 making it the most expensive electricity in Europe. That rise is blamed on renewable. It is cool to break records but at what price?
70% of that is taxes and subsidies for almost every kind of energy (including coal)
Energy production and usage won't effect 70% of the price, so if you want to have a better comparision, you'd need to compare the price without taxes.
bickerdyke
Is that for all electricity, or just that produced by renewable means? I'd also hazard a guess that the Germans are more environmentally conscious and willing to pay that bit extra if it benefits the environment.
I never got why people expected renewable to equal cheap. Renewable is supposed to mean not damaging the environment, or using up a finite resource. I guess people figured that since you don't have to buy wind, sun or tide as a 'fuel' that it should be free.
More "efficient" ways to create energy compared to not paying anything for fuel?
I'm not going to repeat the fairy tale from free solar power, but the cost structure is completly different from fossil power to be compared that way. And fuel prices WILL rise. That's basically avoiding to have to pay (comparatively high) upfront costs for solar/wind when it is to late and fuel prices are rising. Because, if your electricity bill has to cover rising fuel prices AND establishing regenerative power sources, it will skyrocket.
bickerdyke
Here's a clue. Germany is NOT a sunny nation.
Doesn't that make those 5.1TWh even more remarkable?
bickerdyke
Renewables are doing so well in Germany that their neighbours have cut the German grid out, got tired of seeing their transformers burn: http://www.praguepost.com/news/15258-region-german-green-energy-push-needs-a-rethink.html
and German companies are moving to inhouse power generation because they can't take the losses caused by power fluctuations: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/instability-in-power-grid-comes-at-high-cost-for-german-industry-a-850419.html
But at what cost?
Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.
So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.
Germans may pay more per kWh of energy, but in absolute terms they still pay less because they consume much less energy.
I'm paying 22 Euros a month (100% solar/hydro/wind), that's $30. How much do you pay? If I'm paying twice as much, you're paying $15, right? Right? Come on, tell me.
In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.
I'm from Denmark, and no, we're not. You are quoting figures with a tax that has nothing to do with production of electricity from renewables.
Breakdown here for all of Europe.
Please stop spreading misinformation.
The charts do not demonstrate the total cost to the consumer. There is only one way to determine this cost, look at the wholesale electricity price, this can be found here (coupled to the German market): http://belpex.be/marketdata/dam/public/images/CWE-MCP-Chart-FP-Big.html you can see the price is dropping when the sun is shining. Solar is being subsidised as the holy grail. Even the government cannot continue to swim against these market currents. It is better to look at alternatives like gas-(or wood pellet)-cogeneration, saves large amounts of CO2, this has at least got some flexibility in it, and it can be produced during "expensive periods". Wholesale prices have a lower boundary at +- 17-20 Euro per Mega Watt hour, an upper boundary of +- 60. Have a look at your bill and tell me "what explains the difference ??". This is all about excessive overhead in ex-government monopolies with some juice of unrealistic greenery on top. Nothing to see with a technical solution.
Big Shitstorm.
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
The German Army may have something to do with it: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/peak-oil-and-the-german-government-military-study-warns-of-a-potentially-drastic-oil-crisis-a-715138.html
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost. Yes, we'll see some benefits, some gains. But those are minor next to the costs. One of the costs will certainly be wars. The fastest way to fire up a war is not over some high minded principles, or religious dogmas, powerful though they are. It's a lack of the basic necessities. What will people do if they are suddenly faced with starvation, but the neighbors still seem to have enough?
But you're willing to plunge ahead with your own religion. Science is never fully settled. 100% confidence is fantasy. Only morons say that we should make no changes because we don't know enough, by which they mean we don't know everything about an issue. The point is, we will never know everything about an issue. Do we know enough to act with sufficient confidence of being right? Yes! Whether the world would be a better place if it was warmer is not the issue. We can always head that direction later, eyes open, by our own choice only, if we decide that is best. But right now, that's not the case. The really peculiar thing is the conservative, anti-change political parties are willing to go ahead and chance the massive changes that ocean level rise will force upon us, to avoid having to make relatively tiny changes now. I've seen that they maintain self consistency with their principles through a fool's technique of denial. Gloabl Warming isn't real, it's a liberal plot! Then I suppose, should ocean level rise come to pass just as we have foretold may well happen, that amid the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the incredible losses that they'll trot out that loser excuse that there was nothing we could do about anyway, it was God's will.
I'm certainly not doing nothing now, so I can say "I told you so" decades later. That would be damned cold satisfaction. God help us all if we do heed the voices of denial. And as to it being God's will, maybe it is a test. God is always testing us. After all, we have free will. Are we going to be fools, and suffer God's wrath for it? Have we learned nothing? Thousands of years ago, we were far more ignorant. The Roman Empire was smart and industrious, but made many mistakes through ignorance, some of it deliberate. They actually did have hints that lead was toxic, but they brushed it off. Another serious error in basic policy were the walls. Certainly the walls helped keep the uncivlized barbarians at bay, for a while. But ultimately the walls were only a way of putting off the hard work of dealing with the real problems, not a lasting solution themselves. Rome never got around to starting work on those problems before the walls were breached. Today, some politicians want to erect a wall along the US-Mexico border. That kind of brute problem solving totally ignores the underlying issues. It may be that we'll have to build dikes to keep the ocean back. But if it is better to head off ocean rise, surely we should go that route? We should at the least explore all viable options. Making no changes is certainly one of the options, and definitely the cheapest and easiest up front, but likely not the best choice we could make over the long term.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The solar cells cost is largely measured in the energy made to create it. Efficiency = output/cost. We just reached parity in 2010- that's pretty pathetic. And that doesn't include the costs of transportation, loss due to damage from hail, etc, and other such issues. Until this ratio becomes really large (10x), solar cells aren't much better than a battery- you put energy in and get it back out later.
There have been many promising technologies 'on the horizon' that are supposed to make solar cells cheap (made with little energy).
This is the most recent article of printable solar cells. I read one just like this 10+ years ago:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/17/a3-printed-solar-cells
Then you have the "new material" of the hour:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/517811/a-material-that-could-make-solar-power-dirt-cheap/
And all the other stuff, such as:
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/163561-the-key-to-cheap-solar-power-may-have-been-discovered-over-150-years-ago
Until something radically changes, these 'investments' in solar companies are really just there to line to pockets of political cronies, like the 33 companies that made large donations to our president and received even larger 'investments' which were paid out before the company declared bankruptcy
http://blog.heritage.org/2012/10/18/president-obamas-taxpayer-backed-green-energy-failures/
Well spoken, Bruce!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
This is likely just feeding a troll, but nuclear plants run by using fission to produce heat. That heat heats water to steam to run through turbines to make electricity. That steam needs to be cooled. The fission reactor needs to be cooled.
So nuclear plants need HUGE amounts of water. Big lakes, big rivers, or the ocean. That's it - it needs to be by one of those three. Coincidentally, that's where people live in large numbers. If we could stick the plants out in a remote desert we would. We can't.
You plan as best you can - they did pretty good in Japan actually. First you had the earthquake - boom. As a result you shut down the nuclear plant. So no power to run the pumps. Use backup generators for that. Tsunami hits - bigger than the protecting wall can handle. Takes out the backup generators, so no cooling again. Get portable generators in - oops! Can't hook them up - power couplers are incompatible. Guys running the plant don't make all the correct decisions from there - they make a few mistakes, wait too long to do some things, trying to save the plant rather than wreck it forever.
And there you have it - all of that had to go wrong, in order, for ONE reactor at ONE nuclear plant in all of Japan to have a meltdown - that was contained pretty well all things considered - while 10s of thousands lost their lives to natural disaster-S that caused it.
Friggin' Monday Morning Quarterbacks, the lot of you.
Germany is one of the worst places in the world for solar power, partially due to the latitude, but mostly due to the cloud coverage. These maps show the effective insolation, taking into account cloud coverage and sun position averaged over a year: Insolation world map, and Germany compared with the USA.
34% is remarkably high when taking into account how cloudy Germany is (and most months do worse than that). It is amazing that Germany has made solar power work as well as it has. Solar power in California would automatically be 2.5 times as economical as it is in Germany, and it would be 3+ times as cheap per W in Australia.
So people shouldn't be thinking "Germany is showing us that solar power is inefficient", but rather "If even Germany can make solar power work, then it will be trivial for everybody else".
They produced 5.1 TWh/month = 7.1 MW. I wish they had produced 5 TW, but you're off by a factor of 720!
I'm ready for the flood of excuses (technical and not) about how the US could do it but...
Man, we are so fat and lazy.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
How would you tell the difference between BP-owned submarine patents, or just some pie-in-the-sky solar corporation that ran out of capital and died before releasing any products (that still managed to file patents before dying).
From the outside, both cases would look identical. A brand-new company files article of incorporation, registers some patents, and then nothing is ever heard from them again.
What's more profitable to BP? William Randolph Hearst could have switched to cheaper hemp-based paper for his newspapers in the 1920s, but because of his massive investments in timber and paper-making, it was more profitable to him to attack hemp-based paper instead. He chose to do it by using his media empire to demonize hemp and marijuana instead of through patent-warfare, but it's no different.
Powerful people always attack new technology that threatens their investments, even if that new technology might benefit for society as a whole.
BP has 2 choices, it can adopt the future technology of solar and be just one player among thousands, or it can cling to it's massive oil land investments by fighting against the future of solar (though patents) and remain one of the top players for at least long enough for the current board of directors to get a nice fat retirement check.
You are obviously not here to have a conversation on the original topic nor are you looking for information.
Cause clearly, you're the only intelligent person on the planet and no one came up with those questions before, prior to starting to invest billions in that fad of a project they've been running for years and plan to continue running for decades to come.
Clearly, all those people with their sciency engineerity and stuff are buffoons and morons, throwing all that money on a pie in the sky. Buffoons I say!
Or... It could be that your goal is to just keep being negative, bringing up one irrelevant argument after another.
Cause if it weren't so, you'd find both answers to your loaded questions and rebuttals to your foregone conclusions in the links I gave you previously.
I actually COULD have spent this post answering to all your pointless questions and tearing down every single one of your nonsensical points (which is to say ALL of them) but I simply refuse to do it.
Nope. I won't even let you know what are the HVDC losses. Let me check if I remember them correctly. Yup. I do.
But I won't tell you. Look it up yourself. Clearly you are capable of hitting Ctrl+f.
I've wasted way too much time and patience on you as is. This conversation is over. Good night.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Solar doesn't compete against oil.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I don't hate the Sun. I hate people who think that more production from green power is the answer to our problems. Green power production is one part but it is too unreliable to be counted on. Much more money needs to be spent on storage and transmission of electricity so that it is available when and where it is needed and not just when and where it is produced.
In Germany they have a private E.ON and RWN ;) And I bet the prices aren't much cheaper than in the UK.
Sorry to bust your religious Sacred-Private-Enterprise experience. Remember that business is business and religion, religion.\
-- 29A the number of the Beast
We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost.
Poverty is the #1 killer on the planet. Inefficiency increases poverty. Lives will be lost by artificial carbon reduction.
Now what value did you use for a life, and what lives lost estimates did you use and what were the demographics of those lives lost?
The last thing the AGW crowd wants is to admit that carbon reduction costs lives. Not even the UN's IPCC claims that Global Warming is known to represent a cost. But you seem to know better than them, right?
The problem with religion is that you have no citations. Leave the conclusions to the scientists, moron.
"His name was James Damore."
They'd be foolish to evacuate..... If they left they'd miss out on that Darwin award! http://evacuatefukushimanow.wordpress.com/2013/07/30/%E7%A6%8F%E5%B3%B6%E3%83%BB%E3%81%84%E3%82%8F%E3%81%8D%E5%B8%82-swimming-in-fukushima/
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
I am not talking about the religion with the nakkid guy nailed to a pair of sticks.
I am talking about the Capitalist Religion with it's sacred dogmas that private is always better than public and that the market will fix anything and that prices and quality will raise just because something is private.
And there you have E.ON... a private company BTW, together with RWE (another private company) owners of close to 100% of the German energy market and part of the rest of Europe, including my country, Holland. There were some examples at small scale publicly owned gas companies in Germany able to deliver gas at a fraction of the price E.ON was charging.
And we have other examples here in Holland, were the health care for elderly people and the hospitals was put into private hands hoping that hte Holy Ghost of the Market would drive quality and price... without taking into consideration that there was no such market with the results of an extremely expensive system delivering low quality work and costing the tax payer extra money both privately, because we have to pay an inflated prices for services that a public company would have been able to acquire at bulk prices and also because the state has to put money into the system to avoid a total collapse.
Want another funny Dutch example on how to fuck up majorly? Well, this is one of our best: Our railroad network. We privatised the railroad infrastructure and kept the train company (NS) in a sort of Frankenstein semi-private company bing the state the owner of 70% of shares. Result: Chaos! And please note that we Dutch workers depend on out public transport not because we are all Socialist-Green-Eco-Fascists minions of the Evil Global Warming Conspiracy, but because our population density is even higher than in Japan and during peak hours driving your car means moving at an average of 20km/h.
We, unfortunately, live in a society, meaning that a bunch of us live together, if something is working fine, like here in Holland the (old) school system, the health system or our trains then don't touch it... As a matter of fact these trains were said to be so efficient that Hitler used them to transport people to the extermination camps. Don't worry, colabs were hung and shot after the war... this was fortunately not left to private hands.
My point is not that public is good and private evil, my point is that we must abstain from mixing faith with economics: We should prefer the option which costs us, the tax payer and consumer less: Be it taxes or fees doesn't matter, an Euro is an Euro and where it goes after it leaves my bank account is not of my concern.
-- 29A the number of the Beast
As a Tsunami hit them - let's ban "Acts of God" and all make a saving on our insurance.
*shakes fist at the sky*