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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."
With enough government subsidies, I'm sure you could build a profitable solar plant underground...
Nuclear subsidies are in your taxes, where you don't see them. Solar subsidies are in the electricity price, where you see them. Nuclear energy is not cheap energy, and while it does work for base load, you only need to look at France in the winter and in the summer to see that relying on nuclear does not cover all loads, so you also need other power plants on standby, so nuclear does not have an advantage over wind and solar there.
Well to quote the wikipedia page quoting a financial times article:
Due to the costs of this "Energiewende" Germany now has Europes highest energy costs. Costs have risen over the last 5 years even for industrial consumers who are exempted from the costs of the renewable energy subsidy that consumers pay. In 2013, energy was 4 times cheaper in the United States than in Europe, and 6 times cheaper than in Germany.
It comes at a price and the sweet spots to produce renewables have already been picked, to keep it up they must use less and less ideal areas and means. Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Subsidies and negative externalities of the fossil fuel and other non-renewable energies and future return to scale of the solar energies are distortions to the economic picture and must be excluded for an honest discussion on the topic.
FTFY
.: Semper Absurda
"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. :)
It can, only problem is last time I checked (a few years ago though) it took about 6 TW of energy to produce solar cells that could deliver that much energy.
Don't you mean TWh? TW is the rate of energy production.
The good news is that the cells last for longer than a month. From your guesstimate figures it seems like they break even remarkably quickly, and then are energy positive for decades.
A 200 W solar panel costs about $400 today. If that cost were entirely from the energy required to produce it, that would mean it requires 4000 kWh to produce ($400 / $0.1/khW). 200 W * 10 hours a day = 2 kWh per day. In a year, it'll produce perhaps 600 kWh (assuming 300 days of sun). Most panels are guaranteed for 20 years, so that's roughly 12000 kWh over the lifetime of the panel. 12000 kWh > 4000 kWh, no?
Your Yardage May Vary?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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
Yet another example how socialism fails.
You have a weird definition of socialism.
Nice to see them lead but it's not really an act the whole world can follow.
Sure it can. At the cost of higher energy price.
There's lots of related stories.
I just read in a somewhat recent magazine (0-2 year old) how here in Sweden/Scandinavia I think they was often recycling 90-95% (or just 95%) of the building material when they broke down a building.
In the rest of the Europe they was trying to reach 50-95% (or 50-90.)
In the US? 20%.
There's also that story about that plastic stuff in the pacific.
Over here in Sweden almost all aluminium cans are recycled, you pay 1 SEK for them when you get your drink and you get 1 SEK back when you recycle them. When people go out and drink (and just throw or put down their beer somewhere) or maybe leave their soda cans some people browse the cities for cans and look through the trash cans to pick them up and return them.
We do the same for glass (1 SEK) and PET (1 or 2 SEK) bottles.
We have had the same system for beer, cider and wine bottles to. I don't know how it works atm because I don't buy them anyway.
I'm supplied with a compost bag holder and free paper bags to put my compost in and suppost to drop that content into a compost box outside. At the parking lot (same area) I can also leave all packaging which is made of plastic, metal, glass, cardboard and papers&magazines. If you live further out on the country side there's bigger ones like these: http://www.orebro.se/310.html
Around the city there's places like this:
http://www.orebro.se/305.html
They are made like this:
http://www.orebro.se/download/18.1ae77d4612f5d50ab538000632/Atleverket_karta+%C3%B6ver+ramp+och+containrar.pdf
http://www.orebro.se/download/18.1ae77d4612f5d50ab538000634/Mellringe_karta+%C3%B6ver+ramp+och+containrar.pdf
http://www.trollhattan.se/Documents/Tekniska/renhallning/avc_detaljplan_stor2.jpg
Here's a photo of one:
http://www.orebrohus21.se/att/Hovstas%20nya%20%C3%A5tervinningscentral.JPG
http://www.emmaboda.se/upload/Om%20kommunen/Kommunala%20bolag/MHAB/Kopia%20av%20IMG_3356.JPG
There you can leave more or less everything. Electronic (everything with built in battery, TVs, ..), dish washers, fridges, freezers, things you can burn (mostly wood and furniture), plastic, asbestos, metal, light bulbs and FLs, I assume there's also room for things like garden left overs for people with no compost of their own, batteries, paint, thinners, oil, ..
In general the rest garbage is burned for long-distance/district heating (and there's places which burn more nasty stuff to.)
As for land fills those exist to but with clay in the bottom and they put stuff above and so on but I guess that may be the case in many places. But as I understand things we've actually got a bigger demand for garbage to burn (though I assume we get some pollutans/filter material by doing so) than garbage so we import garbage ..
They are rebuilding the largest one (?) in VÃsterÃ¥s:
http://www.malarenergi.se/sv/om-malarenergi/vara-anlaggningar/kraftvarmeverket/Valkommen-till-fornyelsebloggen/
I don't know where to find the nice looking schematics picture but whatever.
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
your table is for total energy consumption, not for electricity.
This explains the huge amount of oil in there. Nobody in his right
mind uses oil for electricity generation.
JFTR, here's the breakdown for electricity in 2012:
source [PDF] - includes an interesting row for "percent renewables",
rising from 3% to 23% since 1990.
So yeah, still a long way to go (lignite? really?), but working hard on actually going it.