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Half of Germany's Power Supplied By Solar, Briefly
assertation (1255714) writes with this interesting tidbit from Reuters about the state of solar power in Germany: 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.
Technology has been impinging on far too many aspects of our lives, and one place where you have to be careful is the automated home. Maybe I'm just old fashioned, but I prefer physical controls over virtual ones. This is especially true when it comes to turning off the lights in the kitchen.
My home doesn't need automation. If there was a robot that would straighten out my office and vacuum rugs and dust and re-arrange the bookshelves, then I'd be all in. As long as the device wasn't hooked to the Internet to be reprogrammed by some misanthropic engineer who would find it amusing to have the robot trash the house.
There is no such robot and none on the horizon, nor any free lunches, not even at Google.
Opinions The Internet is part of the problem. In the case of home automation, it is particularly frightening. You know that once an automation system is established and can be operated remotely online, then someone will hack the system and make a lot of people miserable.
Ever since Google bought Nest, this is the first thing I think of.
This week at Google I/O, the company might brag about Nest, and show some fakakta Web interface to turn off lights you may have left on. These devices will be hooked to Google Central so your habits can be studied. Thus you can be delivered targeted advertising.
You all know what targeted advertising is, right? It's those genius ads that show up all over the place trying to sell you a product you already bought. Yeah, those ads.
I have toyed with various attempts at home automation since before the X10 standard. It's always been about spending dollars to save pennies. The Nest Thermostat is a classic example. It is indeed a cool product that is nothing more than a remotely programmable on-off switch that costs $250. If China decided to produce the same thing, it would be $20.
The idea is that you can program it and it can learn and it can maximize energy and save money and save the environment and on and on. It's also cool looking and shows that you are a conspicuous consumer for owning one. Only geeks will program them to any extreme and the real amount of money saved will be nil. At the end of the day it's just another over-priced, cool-looking gizmo for bored geeks who will claim they actually "love" the device.
This is just the beginning for Google, though. The real target is the full home automation market, which does indeed exist. It targets large unmanageable McMansions found in the suburbs of Dallas and Atlanta. You know, the palatial multi-story homes built in a subdivision on postage stamp sized lots. You generally fly over them while landing at the airport and wonder who in their right minds would buy a place like this.
Answer: home automation suckers.
Home automation has been around since 1975 yet has never become a mass market phenomenon. Frankly, this is because it is a pain in the arse. Companies like Google, whose executives live in a dream world of their own creation, tend to drift into thinking that everyone wants this crap.
My home automation is more average and typical of the American public. It consists of yelling, "Hey, it's freezing in here, can someone turn on the heater?" That usually results in the other end of the transaction yelling, "Get up and turn it on yourself!"
This is real voice command and generally better understood than anything Google will develop. Other commands include. "Can't anyone turn off any lights in this house?" "Who left the water boiling on the stove?" "The dog needs food!" and the classic, "Did anyone get the mail?"
This is real home automation.
The real problem with all this Nest malarkey will come once these systems are on the net-the so-called "Internet of things." Once they start getting hacked there will be no stopping it. Nobody will be bothering to update the devices to block unwanted access-until they come home in the middle of summer with all the heaters on full blast, the lights flashing on and off, and the coffee pot on fire.
This is exactly where this all leads. And it only evolves to this because people are too lazy to get up and turn off some lights or set a thermostat.
I've seen headlines elsewhere that just say "Germany Now Gets Half Its Power from Solar". "Now" is misleading in that context.
This is a noteworthy milestone, and a good sign, but let's not exaggerate it.
Would be more impressive in February.
Amazing, in 24 hours it'll be 528 gigawatts, amazing ramp up of production.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
When the blackhole cometh?
Yeah, but everybody knows they get more sunlight than the U.S... fox news said so ;)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYDVdqWOXxY
@foxyloxy
In a the right direction. We do not need nuclear energy to power anything, we just have to make solar and wind farms.
The German government is currently choking the solar industry as hard as they can. Installed panel area is going to go from nearly exponential growth to an almost complete standstill. The power industry has successfully turned the public against the people who installed solar panels on their roofs by blaming the rising electricity costs entirely on the renewable power subsidies. People who produce their own electricity will soon have to pay a tax on that electricity as well, not just on the additional electricity they get from the grid.
and stay indoors and play and work from May through August, on sunny days. When it rains, we'll just go and play outside.
Oh, wait.
Note that gigawatts are power units; gigawattshour are energy units and gigawatts per hour is wrong and misleading. I would expect that the editor would correct such basic mistakes, even tough they come from the linked article.
The most interesting part about Germany's Solar deployment is that they have almost no utility scale deployments. Almost every deployed panel is on the roof of a building of a privately owned residence or business.
This is contrast to the US were better than 50% of the deployed panels are utility scale deployments. Fact is if everyone deployed panels on their homes and businesses south facing roof's we'd have more power than we could ever use. Germany is proof of that.
Great editing job /.! The article is more than 2 years old...
It wasn't nearly half of the POWER used in Germany at that moment. It was, for a moment, about half of the public ELECTRIC grid, in a country where electric is unpopular because it's becoming outrageously expensive. Most of the power used in Germany is not from the public electricity grid.
Here's a thought experiment:
Germany could shut off all of their generators, so there is no electricity on the public grid.
They could then attach a single 9-volt battery to the grid, so the only power on the grid would be a few watts from that little battery. The headline could then be:
100% of German electricity provided by one 9-volt battery!
What Germany has actually done is simply a less extreme case of the thought experiment. They've shut down generators, so less power is available. It's not that solar is providing the needed power, the power simply isn't available like it used to be. By supply and demand, as well as tariffs, electricity has become far more expensive, so people have turned more and more to other sources of energy. You won't see a lot of people driving electric cars in Germany because the cost to charge them makes it prohibitive.
Solar is good for alleviating peek load if the weather is right. It needs a storage component to deal with base load and generally be useful. It baffles me that the generally rational and stoic Germans are headed down the road of PV. It amounts to a feel good policy coupled with a hedge on the middle class and above electricity prices (as they own homes and can get the funding to install it). Mandated grid buyback effectively fleeces everybody else via higher rates as they still need to have enough peek capacity to cover peek power when solar is not producing meaning their capx does not go down.
Do not get me wrong if I had a good location for the panels I would have them up, trading a couple hundred buck electricity bill for a cheaper bank loan for 15 years is a good bet. I would effectively have a fixed electricity rate assuming my average production meets or exceeds my average use and that nobody changes the laws allowing for net meetings and forced buyback. Over that 15-20 year life-span it's reasonable to assume my electrical demand will go down via increased efficiency and automation with the only obvious demand increase being a switch to an all electric or plug in hybrid vehicle.
No sir I dont like it.
Surely the fine summary should read "The German government decided to abandon nuclear fission power".
Sounds like they're finally starting to figure out how to make fusion work economically.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
All of these headlines report half of all electricity, not half of all energy. And that is annually around 12-15% of total energy use. Germany got around 8% of energy from solar. Briefly.
Solar is a neat idea, but it is hardly sustainable and not as a replacement for coal (the major energy source in Germany) and oil. Not yet at least.
I wrote a long blog-post, where I actually run the numbers for sustainable energy, including solar and wind, and the outlook is very bleak. Only around 5% of the world energy consumption comes from sustainable sources, primarily hydroelectric plants. Further adding burning down forests ("biomass") as sustainable, increases that to almost 17%. If you want to eat the whole thing, it's at https://westergaard.eu/2014/05/the-sustainable-energy-scam-and-the-lack-of-perspective/
All in all, this is quaint, but counter to actually solving global warming. Solar and wind do not work. Hydro sort-of does, but only nuclear and fracking actually make a serious dent in CO2 emissions.
I don't know why they are making such a big deal about 22 Gigawatts briefly. Is it really worth bragging in this day and age? In 2014? It is on the record someone generated 1.21 Gigwatts briefly at 10:04 PM November 5, 1955 using some home made contraptions, extension cords and a lightning conductor, in Hill Valley California. By Moore's law, we should be generating so much more than mere 22 Gigawatts.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
I didn't realize Germany was in Tsunami territory.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Unbelievably lame. There is no such unit as a "gigawatt per hour".
You can't even be sure what this means, if anything.
was pushed back to the bottom of the stack by the 31 triple coal plant that powers six cities.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It seems Germany is leading the way in showing, by example, that every bit of American futzing about solar power and unions is, to put it down hard, a load of cultish crap designed to make rich people much richer.
They are an economic powerhouse with strong exports, a union-based worker's economy, and now they've shown you can run 50% of an industrial economy off the power of the sun, in something less than ten-twenty years. WHILE they absorbed a pauperized East Germany after the Soviets finally gave up. Oh yep - they innovate like mad. With health care for everyone.
Randites, avoiding the No True Scottman fallacy, examine why you are wrong on this. Seriously, before your wreck us beyond repair.
Well, Japan was supplied of way over half its energy needs by the US, for free.
Fortunately, it was very briefly.
"If there was a robot that would straighten out my office and vacuum rugs and dust and re-arrange the bookshelves"
It's ironic, the only thing holding this up is the power supply.
And what really gets me is that while other countries (even China!) are moving forward and actually doing something about non-fossil fuel energy, we are having this asinine debate here in the US and infighting about Green Energy.
So, in the not too distant future, the rest of the industrialized world will be powered significantly by sustainable, clean and much cheaper energy (costs WILL come down below fossil), we in the US will be backwards and bitching and moaning about how the rest of the World is kicking our asses yet again.
There is this portion of society that is so afraid of change that they are holding us back. Fossil fuel, although cheap now, will go up in price and continue to do so - there is no doubt what so ever. It's also old fashioned, inefficient and polluting. We as a culture love new technology and we never hesitate to glom onto the new - except when it comes to energy.
I think part of it is the ceaseless propaganda from very rich and powerful people whose wealth is dependent on us being backwards.
Too bad the US doesn't have that much sunlight and have to rely on coal.
Electricity in Germany is about 3x as expensive as it is in the US. Electricity is not just what you pay at home, but it's a big component of the price of goods and services, so German consumers are paying a premium for this.
The units on gigawatts/hr works out to energy/time^2. I'm not even sure what that means. Rate of acceleration of energy use?
Assuming the Reuters reporter never took physics and the actual figure is 22 gigawatts, while it's an impressive amount, it's peak production. Solar has just about the worst capacity factor (ratio of average production to max peak production) of any energy source. If you look at Germany's solar statistics, they produced 31400 GWh in 2013. The average of their 2012 and 2013 installed (peak) generating capacity was (32.643+35.948) / 2 = 34.296 GW (averaged to take into account new plants coming online through the year).
34.3 GW * 8766 hours (1 year) = 1.08 * 10^18 joules
= 300673.8 GWh of potential solar production - i.e. how much the plants could have produced if they were operating at max capacity the entire year.
So their solar capacity factor is just 31400 / 300674 = 0.1044.
Compare to U.S. average capacity factors of
0.9 for nuclear
0.7 for geothermal
0.64 for coal
0.4 for hydro
0.35 for offshore wind
0.22 for onshre wind
0.145 for PV solar in the U.S. (not on chart)
So if Germany's peak solar production was equivalent to 20 nuclear plants, that means their entire installed base of solar plants has only eliminated the need for two nuclear plants. (There's some wriggle room here because they're comparing a peak load power source to a base load power source, but I'm just rolling with the comparison they made.) This is why you don't compare power production technologies based on peak production. It's like comparing the fuel efficiency of different cars only when they're going downhill - it unreasonably favors cars with low drag coefficients even if they may have inefficient engines. You should be comparing average production through the year (equivalent to peak production * capacity factor). Just like you should be comparing the average fuel efficiency of cars across all use cases.
Strangely those other sources probably pollute far far more than the fission power plants they are replacing.
No sir I dont like it.
...and Slashdot covered it at the time: http://hardware.slashdot.org/s...
I think the submitter meant to post this story, which is about the new record of 24.2GW: http://www.iflscience.com/tech...
I have no
As the posted reuters report is from May 2012 it is now over 2 years old.
As of 2014, peak solar power of more 20 Gigawatts is a pretty common occurence in the German electricity grid if the weather is sunny.
A quick look at the solar power generation data ( see
http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Statutory%20Publication%20Requirements%20of%20the%20Transmission%20System%20Operators/Power%20generation/Actual%20solar%20power%20generation
) shows e.g. that 20 gigawatts were exceeded May 19th through May 22th 2014.
"It wasn't nearly half of the POWER used in Germany at that moment. It was, for a moment, about half of the public ELECTRIC grid, in a country where electric is unpopular because it's becoming outrageously expensive. Most of the power used in Germany is not from the public electricity grid."
Do people have their own household generators running on natural gas or something? I could understand that power for heating could mostly come from gas, but presumably that is only needed in the winter? ( Does Germany even have winter? I think Fahrenheit (the guy who invented the temperature scale) was German and he seemed to think that 0F was as cold as you could get, so I guess they don't have a real winter there.)
watch and learn America, watch and learn, but this time not how you learnt from the Nazi's in world war 2 by completely copying the Nazi's policies of putting everyone in jail and expanding government growth since the 1950's with the FBI and CIA which are mainly republicans hobbies, and the US growth into the biggest bureaucracy the world has ever seen under the GOP..,. (you make the Stasi look like clowns in bunny suits)
US bureaucrats shouting: GOP!!! GOP!!! GOP!!!...
I mean, 5% of the world polluting for 25% (you're a fucking wanker)
50% by solar that sounds great until you realize fossil fuel plants have to be kept running to replace that capacity on a moment's notice just in case some clouds blow by the sun. Solar does no good on winter evenings when power consumption is highest. The result is redundant generating capacity that generates CO2 from it's construction and maintenance, plus the fuel that is burnt keeping the conventional power plants running. Even James Hansen has said renewable power supplies do not scale well and the only effective way to reduce CO2 emissions is nuclear power.
Anyone that noted that the article actually was from 2012???
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If you cherry-pick data, you can get it to say just about anything. It's similar to how hybrid cards are allowed to use MPG data from when only the electric motor is running, making the clain that they get hundreds of miles per gallon. What did they /do/ with that electricity? Could it be stored and used when the sun went down? How efficient are they over time? I'm sorry, but nuclear power and continued prudent use of fossil fuels are the ONLY solutions for the worlds energy problems. It is physically and mathematically impossible to power the world with straight wind or sun power (which is not to say it couldn't be used as a catalyst in some yet-to-be-discoved process).
Sorry to rain on your solor parade.
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
No, it's worse than that. They supplement their coal with natgas from Russia.
That's Shroeder and Merkel's policy.
Replace nuclear that Germany can do itself with more expensive natgas that they buy from Russia.
Arguably better than fracking the ancient German landscape, though, which is the Bush and Obama policy.
Don't be ridiculous. The lights are still on in Germany. It's true they have made massive efficiency gains in the last decade, but it's not like there is a shortage. Apparently, Germany loves electric cars, so I don't know where you got your misinformation.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Things like "not risking dying from radiation sickness"
For this to be true you also need all your neighbours to stop using nuclear power and unfortunately Germany is right next door to France which has a huge nuclear power generation capacity. Remember how far the radioactive fallout cloud from Chernobyl went? The result is that Germany now still faces all the disadvantages of nuclear power without receiving any of the advantages.
Electricity in general is more expensive in Europe. Switzerland, Sweden, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands & Belgium all have rates over 25 cents per KWH, I highly doubt all of them have the renewable requirements of Germany (~36 cents per KWH). While Germany's requirements may have resulted in some added cost it is unlikely to be anywhere near 3x. They'll probably save money in the long run, as fuel costs go up and a good chunk of their generation capacity doesn't require fuel.
As of 2011, Germany had already spent over 100 billion Euros subsidizing solar. This level of subsidization could easily produce over 20 nuclear plants and would basically end the further need for carbon free electrical energy spending, while offsetting much more carbon in a shorter period of time. Not to mention the vast economic benefits to the country from supplying a majority of the plant components versus buying from Asia. But, Germany will continue to spend even more, sending vast sums of money to Asia in efforts to just 'keep up', while their electricity prices continue to skyrocket, resulting in higher costs for business and manufacturing.
Those higher costs don't seem to be putting much of a damper on Germany's economic growth.
Oh, wait, maybe it's because Germany's renewable output actually appears to be driving down energy prices, not only for Germany but its neighbors. Prices peaked in November of 2013, and fell in December, January, February, and March -- not exactly "peak solar" months, as others have pointed out.
I am from Germany and have to say that your comment is really nonsense. Where do you get your rediculous information from?
Electricity Prices Fall In Europe As German Renewable Energy Output Increases
According to this article, wholesale electric power contract prices in Germany and neighboring countries peaked last November at 50.50 Euro/MWh, which I believe works out to just under 7 cents/KWh. Ask folks in California whether that's "outrageously expensive".
Since then, prices have decreased in December, January, February, and March; March prices were about 4.85 cents/KWh.
Even better, due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available, the price of non-renewable power is sometimes actually dropping to or below zero . That's right, there were apparently brief intervals where nuclear and coal plants were paying customers to draw power from them.
Good lord the strawmen are actually gaining sentience.
I thought the same thing, but I think there's a decent chance a German press release mistranslated an attempt to say "for an hour".
Germany has shifted from Nuclear to Coal and turned the environmental clock back to the Coal age. 50% solar for a few minutes one afternoon is a politically motivated red herring.
And powered by coal. Or do solar panels work at night in your world?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
> Replace nuclear that Germany can do itself
Germany does not have a relevant amount of uranium, so it very much cannot.
Your statement becomes even more ridiculous when you consider that Ukraina for example is 100% dependent on Russia for nuclear power since nobody else currently produces fitting fuel rods.
Germany is replacing nuclear with cheap high polluting coal. The solar is a PR stunt to distract from an unmitigated environmental disaster being perpetrated in the name of environmentalism. Is climate change a bad thing or not, because if it is then they need to start those nuclear power plants back up.
Their price of electricity is $0.36/kWh, which is absurdly high by US standards. Theyre like one of the top 10 most expensive places for electricity, according to this.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm guessing you didn't read the page you to? It says 0.12% of sales in Germany, compared to 0.68% in the US. In other words, 99.88% of Germans don't buy electric cars.
that is they do untill one of those fission plants goes boom as the reactors of Fukusihma did.
Are you seriously saying that the Nuclear or Coal industries don't receive any subsidies?
Nuclear is hugely subsidized energy industry, considering that the Government has to underwrite the insurance, since no insurance company in the world will underwrite a nuclear power station. Ask the Japanese, or the former USSR or the Ukrainians how cheap nuclear is. Not to mention plant construction is typically subsidized, whether it be nuclear, natural gas, coal etc.
Baseline power will need to be provided somehow, but what industry you subsidize, and where you put your development dollars is the real question.
Regarding your statement about solar not cutting down on any CO2 emissions, I dont even know where to begin its so incredibly wrong.
They are burning coal for power when there's not enough sun and wind
> due to regulations requiring grid participants to purchase renewable energy when it's available,
Requiring someone to buy it for you doesn't change the cost. It just means that someone else is paying the cost. In this case, that someone else ends up being the consumers, who have among the highest power bills in the world.
I guess you can't fix stupid. You can inform people, but stupid stays stupid.
There's several million degrees of geothermal energy just under our feet according to Al Gore.
Also, since, you know, Global Warming, Germans won't need heat in the Winter, so solar is a good investment.
It's still cheaper per kWh than oil, which itself is outrageously cheap (taking into account global warming and dependency to rogue states).
What's unpopular is when people notice that they use too much electricity and have to choose between nukes and coal powerplants.
For nuclear plants, the fuel is the cheap part. An Germany can buy fuel from a wide variety of sources. If it dislikes the ethics or warmongering of one supplier of uranium to can go to another. It does not have that option for natural gas – they must buy the bulk from Russia.
Nobody is mentioning that Germany just recently started upon a SIMILAR plan for ENERGY STORAGE! Germany's solar boom is now going to be followed by energy storage technology in likely a similarly democratized distributed storage grid. No matter the source, power storage is important tech-- nuclear doesn't ramp down with demand and solar is at the mercy of the sunlight. An actually intelligent grid is also likely to resultæ they are already way above the USA on this front as well. They can route wind and solar power pretty well already. Wind may not blow by you today but somewhere else it is; same with sun (except at nightæ we can't realistically move that around the worldæ but perhaps some nation will perfect space solar before we get to fusion?)
More Nuclear wouldn't benefit the economy like their move to wind and solar has. They can export far more related to wind and solar than nuclear power. Conventional Nuclear has a fuel problem; no, I don't mean just waste I also mean new fuel. Sure it'll last a long time and it takes so little of it but it also is not abundant. The USA was the #1 in uranium and now they have none and import the stuff. All gone. already (part of the reason they started making fuel out of the weapons was because of this fact, plus politically it was a good move.)
Paying more for power is already what they had to do. It was WISE to raise prices early and fund a transition to something that wouldn't rise in cost over time. Long term planning; something unbelievably radical over in the USA.
Every licensed installer in my state charges 6-10x the wholesale panel price and will only do a fixed bid install that is about 4x the T+M labor cost.
Citation? Which state? My Anecdote: I walked into the solar place in my town and the first thing they proposed when I laid out my situation was that I do the install myself. About the only labor I couldn't do myself would be the final hookup. They'd provide the plans and instructions.
I'm not seeing any requirements to use a licensed installer here. It might be a state/city requirement.
In effect I can put up the 100 or so pannels to meet my current needs for 30k including skilled labor yet the cheapest installer it looking for 100+ with the government programs taking it back down to 80 meaning they are making 70+k on whats quoted as a 2 day job with a 5 man crew.
100 panels? How much electricity do you use? 25 would cover the average household in the USA(10,837 kWh/year, each panel producing 437 kWh/year, even in the middle of the country). Standard panels today are 250-300 watts each. Even the cheapest pallet of 20 300 watt modules will run you $5,270, or $26,350 in panels alone, without racking or inverters(~$4.5k). Checking other online sites shows similar pricing.
As such, wanting it done for $30k means the workers would be doing it for free. The $70k worth of 'labor' does seem inappropriate.
I don't read AC A human right
No, they receive subsides. Can you tell me the right tax scheme for coal, nuclear, wind, electric cars, etc.? I have mentioned this in this thread that carbon taxes are the right way to go. It covers all sides of the issues in the most efficient manner.
Regarding your statement about solar not cutting down on any CO2 emissions, I dont even know where to begin its so incredibly wrong.
Sadly for Germany it is spot on. Solar is variable and the backup is coal. It is fixable. Natural gas can be spun up faster than coal, the energy grid could be upgraded, storage could be added, etc. But until these fixes are put in investing in solar makes no sense.
The German power grid is connected to it's neighbores.
The problem for the Gemans is that only poeple pay energie tax but businesses don't. The Germans use French Nuclear at night like many eu countries.
You're saying that as though it's inevitable. It's not.
a wide variety of sources? You mean Kazakhstan or Canada. They control just over 50% of worldwide Uranium production. Australia, Namibia and Niger have the next 25%. Then you have Russia, Uzbekistan, and the US. That's really it. Full list here
Of course Canada and Australia (the US too, but they're at 3% of the market and probably use most of it internally) would most likely not have any problems selling Uranium to Germany in the future
More joules of heat for each kilogram of CO2 emitted...that would be my guess...
There's a big difference between the US and Germany: the US has an awful lot of territory, so it can afford to waste and pollute large tracts of it (which it still does on a regular basis), yet have sufficient clean land for other purposes. Germany is a lot smaller and more densely populated, and it has to exercise a lot more caution with its environment than the US
Besides which, Europe as a whole seems to import 33% of its oil and 48% of its gas from Russia. Now consider that Russia seems to be sponsoring environmental groups in Europe that oppose fracking. Why would that be, you think?
Given Russia's showdown with the Ukraina (annexing the Crimea and turning the screws on by jacking up the price of natural gas) and Putin's determination to err ... restore Russia's political clout and former "glory", wouldn't you do your level best to try and worm your way out of energy dependence on Russia? The Germans seem to be doing exactly that.
In other news ... China is busily overtaking the US as largest economy, and it has no oil, no gas, but loads of coal. It's also the world's manufacturing hub. And then there's India growing steadily. Population growth in Asia is still massive (in absolute terms) and its prosperity is steadily rising. With that inevitably comes an increased energy footprint.
I believe than in the coming 10-20 years energy prices will be determined by what happens in Asia, not in the US or Europe. And the only way I see oil prices go in that period is up. Way up. Solar seems to be a pretty solid investment from that point of view.
So on balance I'd say that Germany's investment in solar energy is not a stupid move and should probably continue.
In Germany citizens and co-ops own about half of the solar capacity. So it is the average tax payer who both pays for and benefits from the subsides. It represents a real democratization of the energy market. "Not only has energy production in Germany been pried from the hands of the “Big Four,” namely the four utility giants that had dominated the German energy market, but it is now also radically decentralized."
Are the anti-solar folks just complete f*cking tools for big coal/utilites? Energy independence is a very real very powerful thing and will only become more important in the future as we go past peak oil and energy needs increase.
Props to Germany for empowering their citizenry to supply their own power.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
More people have died from falling off roofs while installing solar panels, than have died from the entire Fukushima catastrophe (which is zero, according to scientists that have examined the issue).
Unless it means something different in Germany than it does in North America, generally speaking a "Think Tank" is code for Political Lobby Group. If you think what comes out of the mouth of such a thing is unbiased, you are crazy.
Good for them for producing what is no doubt a lot of solar energy. I doubt whatever figures they list are meaningful in anyway.
However the point is that renewable energy, on its own is not enough. If on any given day, your power needs fluctuate between 40-50GW, you NEED 50GW of CONSISTENT power from somewhere. Its fantastic that solar can produce 20GW (which I doubt anyway), however if tomorrow it produces 4GW, you now have a deficit of 16GW. Which means blackouts, or total electrical grid collapse as it all cascades into one huge fail. You have to replace that 16GW from someplace... sure you can buy it from your neighbor (which is what Germany does), but realistically what does that do, put the coal and nukes just across your border where you get almost the amount of risk plus none of the control? Renewables are great if you have storage, however that more less takes the form of huge water reservoirs which A) you have a limited supply, B) have their own environmental impact, and C) horribly inefficient.
Barring some magic electrical storage technology, you need both base power, and/or power you can spin up very quickly. Nukes are good because they are always on, constant power. Coal, gas, oil, are also always on, and also you have the ability to shut down generation, or turn it on again as need arises relatively. If the sun isn't shining, solar isn't much help, and if the wind isn't blowing neither will that. Unless your country's name rhymes with Riceland geothermal is pointlessly small potential. Biomass is too small to ever be that useful. Hydro is the only one that is a bit different. Barring some sort of huge long drought, it is pretty great. The only problem with it, is that it is a finite resource. Only certain areas have potential, and once you exploit them all there is no more to be had. Also some countries have more/less area to which to exploit. Tidal power is interesting, but so far no one has really been able to harness it effectively. Only a handful of sites exist around the world, and they are largely experimental. Same goes for current and wave type generators.
Anyway most successful systems employ a mix of generation types, including renewables. Problem is once the ratio gets out of wack, you are going to run into trouble, The only other way to do it is to massively over produce, however that is wasteful, and inefficient, and thus likely very very expensive.
Power mix (all non-green-sources just displayed gray). http://www.agora-energiewende....
Import/export germany european grid http://www.agora-energiewende....
The 22GW solar is now more or less normal during june, but as you can see, there is still a lot to do .
Fantastic, let me know when they have 264 gigawatt hours worth of energy storage so this can replace those nuclear power plants when the sun goes down.
You can't turn off nukes only 50% of the time. If solar isn't making that electricity at night(it isn't) you have to burn coal, oil, or natural gas to offset shutting down the nuclear power plants the remaining 100% of the time. That little wrinkle means the decision to replace nuclear directly translates to burning hydrocarbons until such time that the energy storage infrastructure exists to allow Solar/Wind to overproduce base load by +200%. Burning hydrocarbons = green house gas emissions, smog, and dangerous/deadly radioactive air pollution you don't get from Nuclear.
Anyone doing the mental arithmetic would be interested to know that only 13% of carbon emissions come from the tail pipes of motor vehicles, while 2X times that comes from power plants!
source: www.epa.gov/climatechange/images/ghgemissions/GlobalGHGEmissionsBySource.png
That means that I can support nuclear power and be over twice as effective at fighting climate change as some granola eating hippy buying a Nissan Leaf & voting to ban Nuclear Power based on the premise we'll replace it with Wind and Solar Panels.
Funny how that works! I don't especially care about climate change and I'm less of a problem than the activists who focus on it as a doomsday scenerio. If you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go mine some Bitcoins. lol
One thing I have been curious about...
What was Germany doing with all the power that was being produced by their coal plants during this magic hour? They could not simply turn them off. While it is impressive than they met "50% of their demand" was all the power being produced actually being used or were they dumping it somewhere?
'BRIEFLY' is the key word.
This means that shortly before and afterwards, the power was being provided by other generators - probably fossil fuel.
You can't turn fossil fuel plants off and on at short notice. So while the sun was doing its stuff, those fossil fuel generators were quietly humming away in the background - running and using fuel, but not passing electricity to the grid. They were generating DURING, as well. It's just that their electricity was thrown away.
That is a huge waste, and extra pollution. Renewable power means you have to be able to generate the power twice if you need to - once 'renewably' and again in the traditional way if the sun don't shine. But no one seems to mention this...
I agree that a carbon added tax is far superior to a carbon tax, but I seldom see it mentioned. Has anyone in the public eye pushed for it? Some economist (Krugman?) talked about a carbon tax on the ultimate consumer, which I believe is about the same as a CAT, but that is the only discussion I am aware of.
What is all this bullshit nitpicking crap I read? You are trying to say that the whole MF Sun is not enough to power this filthy planet-landfill of ours if we really WANT to? PV is not the best solution anyway, solar thermodynamic (Nevada Solar One , or Andasol alike) is easiest and less process intensive to manufacture.... Price is nothing, price is a value that we give to some piece of shit table game paper bills... we just need to DO the best thing....
What's interesting is what the original poster fails to mention.
As we know, German wholesale decomissioning of nuclear and conventional power resulted in an increase of solar and wind - and also in an increase in prices.
So manufacturers and private citizens started installing their own solar panels.
Obviously, there is a majority of people who don't have a panel and who are paying higher electricity prices for this experiment. Rating of the Green party has plummeted.
Now German politicians have seized the opportunity: confiscate the electricity that other people's and companie's panels are generating.
Force people with panels to hand over electricity. The german word is "Zwangsabgabe" which could be translated as "compulsory levy" - i.e. "forced seizure".
The debate seems to be "in Germany, should we confiscate electricity from everyone with a panel, or only from bigger players"?
Here is the link - stick this article into bing or google translate:
http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/soziales/eeg-streit-koalitionaere-einigen-sich-auf-oekostrom-reform-a-977264.html
Anyone here with a good knowledge of german who can translate that Spiegel article?
Its funny how people can not wrap their heads around this concept. Try looking at your power bill once in a while, that measure has been around since modern transmission lines.
A kilowatt-hour is a unit of energy equivalent to one kilowatt of power expended for one hour. A heater rated at 1000 watts, operating for one hour uses one kilowatt-hour (equivalent to 3.6 megajoules) of energy.
EZPZ
It wasn't nearly half of the POWER used in Germany at that moment. It was, for a moment, about half of the public ELECTRIC grid, in a country where electric is unpopular because it's becoming outrageously expensive.
What the hell are you talking about?!
Yes, electricity is expensive. But 'unpopular'? What? Everyone is connected to the public grid. Of course there are other sources of power. For instance heating is usually provided by gas or oil. But really, it seems to me you are just trying to find a way to downplay the relative success of regenerative energy in Germany.
I don't care one way or the other, but the fact is 84% Germany's power is not delivered by the public grid. The simple fact is, for that sunny moment, solar provided 8% of the power requirements. There is a big difference between 8% and 50%. Energy policy actually matters. It's important. It will have real impact on your life and mine, so it's important to get it right, to get the facts straight.
I've written about the benefits of hydroelectric power, of geothermal in the areas where it makes sense, for nuclear where it makes sense. I'm notinvested in any particular source of energy. We're all invested in getting it right. When you look at actual facts, solar electric makes good sense for 4%-8% of energy needs. Hydro, geo, wind, and especially nuclear each can provide more. Pretending that solar electric is going to provide the bulk of our energy implies devoting resources to solar that should be devoted to wind. By wasting too much on solar instead of developing more practical sources, we only ensure that we remain dependant on fossil fuels.
Every person who modded this story up should have their karma removed.
None of the fission plants in Fukushima ever went boom.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
What is a "gigawatt per hour"? I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that it should just be "gigawatts", unless the OP was describing the rate of change of power generated... Oh wait - that would be ridiculous.
I don't understand the ranting about the energy peaks in generating solar energy being not at the same time of the day as the peaks in consumption.
With the unused solar energy water is being pumped up in dams. When there's an energy consumption peak the water flows back through water power plants. Of course you will lose much of the energy in the process, but it's a very clean way to store unused power. And that's just yet another part of a really big picture.
Another part for example is building houses. You need an "energy-pass" to build a house in Germany (not quite sure if it's the same in all parts of Germany, i can only talk for Bavaria). Your house has to be as energy efficient as possible or you aren't allowed to build it. Building a house here is very expensive, but the need of energy consumption (electrical power or gas, oil or even wood) to get your house warm in the winter and cold in the summer is decreasing drastically. That saves a huge amount of energy.
Keeping solar plants profitable for all people while forcing them to be energy efficient also helps us releasing the grip of the few giant power companies from ourselves. Finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on that front is also a great achievement after all these years of struggling.
So all in all, we are reducing energy consumption while getting more and more power from "renewable" sources (never understood that term. The sun is not "renewable"). IMHO Germany is on the right path - for once. That's the path we know and where we're good at: Being efficient.
And don't forget, we're also increasing power generation with wind wheels. But i'm not quite sure if that works out as good as solar energy.
SCNR:
http://echtlustig.com/31218/angela-merkel-denkt-ueber-die-windraeder-nach
Translation: "If we turn these off, we'd had less wind, but we'd safe lots of power!"
Which isn't a problem for the vast, vast majority of people, as if you can afford to pay it, you do, and if you can't, the state does. Most people don't waste a bunch of energy, so effectively the prices are cheaper as people simply use far less than in the US.
lol: this is 2012 news you fools
They might be, but the "sophisticated information and disinformation" game works both ways, you know.
I have met neighbors who said they know someone who is sure that Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen is full of shit, but I prefer to rely on facts instead of hearsay.
Anti fracking groups have AFAIK demanded that Rasmussen provide evidence for his "interpretation" or else apologize. Ah, here's the open letter.
It is interesting, though, Nato doing some product placement for the fracking industry, lashing out at Putin and saying: the devil hates fracking, so it must be a good thing. If you oppose it, you're obviously bought by the Kremlin, because everybody in the EU but Gazprom just loves fracking.
Next thing you know, we'll see some sort of a global Foreign Agent Law ... no, treaty, I mean treaty! Not a law, a treaty. My bad. Let's call it an agreement. And always remember: you can't trust the ... Russians.
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
So, for a few hours in the best hours of the best days in the year, solar in Germany managed to produce over 50% of their electricity demands.
But why aren't they producing 100% of their electricity demands from renewables at noon, midweek on a summer day ?
The answer is the dirty side of the Germany renewables plan that nobody wants to talk about.
1 - Even with a boatload of wind and solar capacity installed + its existing hydro, over the whole year, Germany still haven't broken the 25% electricity from renewables mark. Solar+wind is barely half of those 25%, something like 13%.
2 - Germany increased its renewable electricity share from 10% before the current renewables push up to just over 23%, and that increase in 13% only reduced Germany's CO2 for electricity emissions by 5%. Due to a huge increase in coal burning caused by the stupid shutdown of nuclear power plants after Fukushima.
3 - By producing over 50% of its electricity from solar, and having moderate winds at the same time, Germany is already able to produce over 75% of its electricity from renewables in a windy+sunny summer day, since it has (and absolutely needs) lots of baseload electricity sources for nights when the wind is weak, leads to Germany over producing electricity and having to dump that excess electricity onto its neighbors. If France, UK, Italy, Poland and Switzerland all tried to do the Germany plan, the European electrical grid would collapse due to a massive power overload ! Too much electricity just as bad as too little. So in a way, the Germany plan is unsustainable, unless the rest of Europe commits not to go even full solar like Germany !
Ok, enough said ! Before you tell me I'm wrong, go study up on how the electric grid works, go understand the limitations of having millions of micro inverters feeding electricity onto the grid all at once (example of an electrical grid on the verge of collapse: Hawaii).
The only real greenhouse gas free solution to climate change is nuclear !
Is it me or is Germany's deciding to abandon nuclear a bit of a knee-jerk reaction?
Few of the things that actually caused the problems at Fukushima are present in Germany. Like Japan, German engineering is generally considered high quality, but unlike Japan, they don't really have earthquakes (certainly not like any country on the ring of fire) and not much of a coastline.
Considering all the alternatives and costs thereof, nuclear does give pretty good bang for the buck and is (relatively speaking) safe - apart from the number of actual disasters which we can all count on one-hand, there just haven't been that many problems over the past 50-or-so years.
Especially when compared to the alternatives, but we can calculate the risk, and if we calculate said risk to any factor, Nuclear doesn't fare badly, it's just the specter where **IF** something goes wrong at a nuclear facility it can be a **BIG** problem -- but that's a pretty big IF, and a modern reactor design such as what would be used to build a plant likely mitigates the hell out of all that.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Could anyone point out to the journalist that "Watts" is "Joules per second"?
It would be better to wait for good solid facts. At the very least I'd expect a press-conference by Mr. Putin himself stating that it is his policy to keep Europe from lessening their energy dependence on Russia by sponsoring anti-fracking groups.
To be quite sure we'd best wait for a signed, hand-delivered letter from Russia's government confirming the statements of the press-conference in writing.
Don't get me wrong, until a few months ago I was prepared to believe that Russia was simply out for revenue in jacking up the gas price (and why not: it's their damn gas and they're selling to the Ukraina at below market price). What changed my mind was the way they acted in the Crimea and the Ukrainian border provinces. Apparently they wish for a sphere of influence (read hegemony) around their borders in which the rights and interests of the surrounding states and their peoples is a secondary consideration.
They may have stopped short of outright invasion, but they do seem to use classical special-forces handiwork (like setting up and aiding groups that advocate secession, undercover operations by special forces) to great effect. After all ... they really really want their navy base at Sevastopol back. Well, we've seen worse. Really. Even old Gorbachev spoke out to the effect that merging the Crimea with the Ukraina was a mistake (from Russia's point of view).
Again, I don't blame them and I'm certainly not trying to demonize them, but if that's what they want, that's what they want. I'm simply saying we should take note, give due consideration to what their apparent goals are, and adjust our views and policies accordingly.