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Germany's Glut of Electricity Causing Prices To Plummet
WIth an interesting followup to the recent news that Germany's power production by at least some measures was briefly dominated by solar production, AmiMoJo (196126) writes Germany is headed for its biggest electricity glut since 2011 as new coal-fired plants start and generation of wind and solar energy increases, weighing on power prices that have already dropped for three years. From December capacity will be at 117% of peak demand. The benchmark German electricity contract has slumped 36% since the end of 2010. "The new plants will run at current prices, but they won't cover their costs" said Ricardo Klimaschka, a power trader at Energieunion GmbH. Lower prices "leave a trail of blood in our balance sheet" according to Bernhard Guenther, CFO at RWE, Germany's biggest power producer. Wind and solar's share of installed German power capacity will rise to 42% by next year from 30% in 2010. The share of hard coal and lignite plant capacity will drop to 28% from 32%.
This just illustrates that carbon tax is too low
People here keep saying that Germany is adding coal capacity to make up for the closure of nuclear plants, but actually they are reducing it over time. Yeah, in the short term there are more plants, but that is just so they can get running before taking the old ones off line. After that the total capacity will be lower.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Lower prices???? In what world?
The prices per kW/h have risen year after year in Germany. How do I know this? I'm living in fucking Germany and get a higher bill each and every year.
RWE is one of the greediest bitches in Germany. They even have the audacity to ask the government to pay for the save destruction of their own nuclear plants, after receiving subsidies to operate them and extracting as much money as possible for their own pockets.
So instead of extremely high prices we are going to get high prices? Awesome!
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Lists an average price of 26,4 ct/kWh for 2012 in Germany. RWE.de gives me a current price quote of 25,72 ct/kWh.
The average in Europe is 18,4 ct/kWh.
Power may be cheaper on the exchange but the consumer is still getting shafted.
The only people who will profit from this are energy traders and power hungry corporations. They currently pay ~15 to ~12 ct/kWh.
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
The production figures in this article are all given as percentages of demand - not the actual amount generated. There's two reasons Germany could suddenly be producing an excess of energy: supply has increased, or demand has dropped. A quick Google shows German production has dropped 6% in the period 2004-12 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... ).
So the reason isn't that Germany's renewable plants are producing an abundance of power - it's that people are demanding less power; presumably because they cannot afford prices that are among the most expensive in the world ( http://www.contactenergy.co.nz... )
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Funny, I just got a letter stating my (Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) energy prices will rise on August 1st to 27.42 cents per kWh. That translats to 37.43 US cents per kWh. This price will remain in effect until December 2015. Nice.
Abrupt power glitches are a (different) problem, but I'm sure that can be solved, and/or that plants can be upgraded to handle them better. The article is also talking about the rolling mill snagging, where I was hinting at the aluminium electrolysis, which is very much insensitive to these glitches.
Aluminium is a good (compact) way to store electricity. Of course, you can't easily convert aluminium back to electricity, but you can turn off the plant to free more of the existing electricity for other consumers.
http://srsroccoreport.com/germ... :
Since the introduction of the Renewable Energy law in 2000 aimed at replacing coal and gas-fired as well as nuclear power generation by so-called renewable energy sources, the household price for electricity has jumped by more than 200%. German customers now pay the second-highest electricity prices in Europe. At the same time, the task of stabilizing the grid against the massive erratic influx from solar and wind power plants that produce without regard for actual need has pushed the operators to their limits.
One of the major problems with wind and solar is that the projects aren't commercially viable without huge Govt subsidies including long-term contracts by energy utilities to pay 2-4 times the going wholesale electric rate for solar and wind generated power.
This is clever! The German people should be able to undercut the rest of the world with their manufactured products. Cheap 3 phase nuclear electricity should be the goal of every nation, so that fully automatic production of goods frees the people from the slavery and drudgery of repetitive jobs and can fund a new system of benefits for those who do not work that is effective and complete, and start a new “knowledge based economy” for those who do have the mindset to enjoin! If only we the people have to foresight to invest in 3d printing and factory robotics. Then there will be no unemployment or employment, just humans and droids! We move ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
Chemical engineer here. The industry prices for electricity have become so low that it doesn't even make sense to heat up the reactors using turbine-generated steam any more. It's ridiculous. It's cheaper to buy the electricity to generate the steam!
Storage costs money. Lots of storage costs lots of money. Storage wastes energy too -- pumped hydro, the cheapest form of bulk energy storage has an input-to-output efficiency of about 65 percent. Baseload coal, gas and nuclear generation doesn't need storage to be useful and meet demand 24/7/365 unlike intermittent renewable generating capacity, but no-one ever adds the cost of storage to the cost of renewables when comparing prices.
Sadly other places have the same rises and some surpass Germany. It's as if Enron wrote the Standard Operating Procedures for "electricity traders" worldwide and now pointless middlemen infest most electricity industries.
It sucks immensely.
For example, Australia has much lower wholesale electricity prices than Germany yet has much higher retail prices than Germany with the distributors blaming their con on increased infrastructure. That price gouging has driven residential solar to around a two year payback when sized appropriately for consumption.
what it means is we need better ways to spread resources. If Germany could export that power to places that have a lack of power generation capabiity, that would be ideal, no? Same applies for crop surpluses, etc.
We need a better global infrastructure not more taxes that, like all taxes, will not benefit who they are supposed to.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
...pumped hydro...has an input-to-output efficiency of about 65 percent.
I think that's a pretty low number, perhaps typical of older designs. Newer designs can have efficiencies upwards of 80%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://people.duke.edu/~cy42/P...
http://www.colorado.edu/engine...
...and nuclear generation doesn't need storage to be useful and meet demand...
I believe nuclear tends to be quite bad at load following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Of course, it is excellent for always-on power, but not ideal for surges or lulls. In certain cases -- L.A. in the summer, for instance -- solar power, although intermittent on the whole, is intermittent in the most useful way: on a nice clear hot day, there's the biggest demand for A/C and the best solar power production.
...but no-one ever adds the cost of storage to the cost of renewables when comparing prices.
Well...staunch proponents with an ax to grind may not include such costs, but then, staunch proponents of coal with an ax to grind will ignore any externalities related to airborne toxins. Any legitimate study of renewable energy should really include storage costs.
With all that said, I really think Germany did the wrong thing with the whole anti-nuclear energy thing. To paraphrase that quote about democracy, nuclear is the most dangerous form of energy generation, except for all those other sources we've tried ( http://physics.kenyon.edu/peop... ).
Sure, pumped water is better, provided you have the geography and a reservoir handy. Most places don't.
Measures of energy efficiency are meaningless if you're using renewable energy when it would otherwise go unused. The only real question in terms of efficiency is the cost and operational complexity of the facilities, especially in light of the gas yields from fracking.
The Germans have a plant that makes 300 cubic meters of methane per day from 6.6MW of power. The Alta Wind Energy Center can generate 1.3MW -- a scaled version of the German plant could make 50,000 cubic feet of gas a day. That's maximum output, but even if you could only get access to 10% of the wind power you're still creating over a million cubic feet of natural gas a year with energy you could generate but otherwise could not input into the grid.
Sunny days they make tons of "free" electricity.
On cold dark winter nights, where does the power come from?
They can build backup plants that run on coal/gas typically operating under nameplate capacity or they can buy nuke power from the French.
Oh, the irony...
You've got it. What I don't understand is why nuclear electricity is put in the same basket as coal and gas plants. The incidents that Nuclear has gone through in the past 60 years only reinforce my view that it's a safe solution. If given all the fsck-ups that gave us Chernobyl, Fukushima and 3 Mile Island that's all that happened I think that it's pretty much OK. I'm saying this because coal/thermal have their exhaust pipe problems which affect a much greater percent of the population and hydro is in general an ecological mess that also involves massive population relocation.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
Because nuclear industry externalities are less immediate and more severe than coal and gas.
I'd suggest that much of the information about what has gone on in the nuclear industry has been subjected to PR spin and political interference to minimize the true situation. One only has to look at the regulatory powers the IAEA has over what the WHO can publish on matters nuclear to see an example.
Radionuclide releases from any source into the environment have consequences that extend beyond our lifetime. These are the most severe of many plant accidents yet the rest of the industry from mining to spent fuel containment *all* release radionuclides. There is nothing OK about releasing materials that cause cancer, failed pregnancies, introduces transgenic disease by altering the genome of life itself in all species including humans.
If those materials decayed within our generation we may have been excused however, these materials will continue to cause these issues as the different daughter products decay in timeframes lasting hundreds to thousands of generations of humans.
I'm certain that what we have already done (with the existing nuclear industry mess) will make future generations consider us to be the most selfish and sort sighted generations that have ever existed.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is nothing OK about releasing materials that cause cancer, failed pregnancies, introduces transgenic disease by altering the genome of life itself in all species including humans.
Yes I agree, we should stop with coal.
So do I, however, do you even know what the difference is between natural and enriched radio-isotopes? Are you stupid enough to think that a chemical fire from burning coal will produce plutonium and actually have a greater radionuclide release than the Nuclear industry? Do you think that a coal plant can release, tritium or radio-cobalt for example. Did you even question that statement when it was made and check for yourself? No, you didn't.
Nuclear releases less radioactive waste into the environment.
This statement is a fiction, produced from the statement "In normal operations a nuclear reactor releases less radioactive waste into the environment than a coal plant" into your statement. Converted to create the fiction that you shill, believing it refers to the entire nuclear industry - it doesn't.
Chernobyl release about 5 tons of pu-239 into the environment and Fukushima released plutonium chloride and oxide. Then there is releases from mining, enrichment and operational releases from reactors every two weeks (check the NRC guidelines for yourself) showing that the original statement itself is only half true.
You are saying that the coal industry is capable of exceeding these releases because you believe a fiction, not because you have checked the facts.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.