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Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world's most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter's night with little wind. "We are really worried about this situation," says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. "If we don't do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts."
Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply.
Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply.
Use the money you save to buy electricity on the open market when you need it. Just pray that you don't have any jerk-off "power traders" holding energy back from you until the price goes up. Remember what happened to California?
Seriously. If a car can get a 50+kwh battery in it, why can't every house have it too? That storage capacity is enough for a few days of intensive use.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
bollocks... they require servicing and checking they're still putting out the correct frequency etc.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Well, some times technology really disillusions people, no? The fact that it is *possible* to provide real-time pricing as per demand-supply, does not automatically imply that this is the preferred approach. If supply-demand cycles need to be connected, that could also happen at the weekly, monthly or even yearly timeframes. In fact, doing so is probably more fair and more manageable for all parties. After all, that's already related to the current trend in many developed (european?) countries: you pay a flat fee per month for utilities and then some correction fee by the end of the year. Why not walk this line?
Denmark will just start importing more fossil fuel bassed electricity than they do now.
Make hydrogen when the sun shines and the wind blows. Burn hydrogen when it's dark and quiet.
Even with really bad conversion, it's cheaper than maintaining a nuclear plant just for backup.
I am all for the environment but there are times I think those who are trumpeting the "renewable energy" are blowing smokes
Take the solar panel for example --- a common solar panel (not that expensive kind) with a rating of 12% can generate about 10W of power per square foot --- and in places like Denmark, the average hour of sunshine in cloudless sky per day is, -- let me be generous and put it as, -- 5 hours a day
Simple arithmetic tells us that for a one square foot of solar panel installed in Denmark it will produce about 18.25KWH per year. Multiply that by 75% (to account for dust / grime or whatever that blocks the sunlights) we get around 13.69KWH, per year
Now, what is the total energy use of a first world country like Denmark? How many square feet of solar panels must we use to generate enough power for Denmark?
I do reckon that there are other means of renewable energy - like wind turbines or geo-thermal but let's face the reality --- how many wind turbines can Denmark erect before all the birds in Denmark ended up in slices?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Renewables don't follow demand patterns, so hydrogen storage is a very good method of storing energy during times of over production and distributing during under production. It also can stabilize the market prices and dampen the grid spikes. What the conventional utilities need to do is consider hey they can contribute to energy advancements, which might include taking stock in storage technologies.
They need to get on the band wagon, rather than burn every bridge the wagon needs to cross. When that wagon begins to hover they'll be out of luck.
.. they're giving it a go, which is more than can be said for the pathetic, jellyfish government we have here in Australia.
So
those sneering are probably people having no fucking clue on electricity generation and usage , or even how to store energy. Probably the same groups which want to kill nuclear, while at the same time being OK with coal, despite coal releasing more radioactivity and killing an impressive number of people every year worldwide (miner as well as people suffering from various illness due to the pollutions).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Pumping water up a hill and then produce hydro power at peak times. This is an established technology, maybe 60% efficient. There is one setup here near Brisbane AU. Things do not have to be exotic.
(You do need a hill, Denmark may need to rely on its neighbors.)
We don't push solar energy in Denmark nearly as much as we push wind energy. In fact, at the highest peak we've had, 14% of the nations energy supply was met with solar energy, and that was on a perfect summer day. But we already provide more than 30% of our energy from wind on an overall basis, and that is expected to rise much more in the comming years.
After all, we don't have that much sun, but we do have plenty of wind. :)
Jerk-off "power traders"? You're probably accustomed to the nice consequences of electricity being regulated as a utility however if you do what you propose which is buy/sell electricity as a commodity in an open market those are the exact 100% natural behaviors that occur as a consequence. You can't advocate for a fundamentally unappetizing idea like eating 100% of your food from restaurant dumpsters and then follow up by saying "except for all of the rotten food and unsanitary conditions".
I mean you CAN, but it's essentially equivalent to wanting to have your cake and eat it too. You can't have a diet composed 100% of cholesteral, nicotine, and amphetamines and then expect to "hold the heart disease".
"Power traders" waiting to sell power is the fundamental driving ideal behind the "buy low, sell high" mantra of an open market's mission statement. The goal is price efficiency at the expense of, oh... IDK: just the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Our entire modern day society was built on the foundation of the cheap electricity which resulted from the discovery of hydrocarbons. First with coal, and eventually with oil.
Modern day civilization as we know it today(globalization and specialization of national economies fueled by cheap international freight transport) would grind to a halt almost overnight if Goldman Sachs were allowed to do the same thing to piston-banger peaker-plants/natural gas turbine megawatts of production capacity that they have been doing with the warehouses of Aluminum COMEX futures. Source: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-09-03/the-goldman-sachs-aluminum-conspiracy-lawsuit-is-over
You can't just cherry pick the nice benefits from a proposal and ignore the negative consequences. In this case, as ENRON demonstrated: even the "nice parts" translate to the government delivery cash handouts to Wall St investment bankers private bank accounts straight from the Treasury. How? Because when Kenneth Lay drives the price of a kWh to $.50 right after crashing it to $.05 for a year straight(driving all the green energy competition out of business), they now have an effective monopoly on keeping infants and pension collecting grandmas from freezing to death in Detroit. They can hold a gun to the head of voters and demand things like tax breaks. If Congress doesn't play ball: they claim that they're laying off 25% of the workforce in Houston Texas until the governor makes a stink about the mutiny in the upcoming midterm elections.
Small businesses and the working poor doesn't have big fat capital war chests they can sit on as cash buffers to protect them from market volatility. When you remove the low pass filters and subject those parties to crazy volatility they can't forecast market forces with the required stability to justify capital investments. This leaves the driving forces of economic growth sitting on the sidelines while Fortune 500 companies beer bong Uncle Sam's champagne out of a deflated soccer ball.
When we handed investment bankers deregulation dynamite at the beginning of the decade, they turned around and used that "blasting charge" to undermine the capital foundation of the working class and threatened to blow up the real estate equity dam if we didn't hand them TARP cash-money in the middle of a liquidity crisis. Rather than burn their war engines and back-fill the trenches, they then used that money to buy government treasuries with the governments own money.
Now that the middle class class has lost their home equity line of credit cash buffer: you want to give those same people(the "Flash Boys") the ability to "flash crash" the national energy grid like they were able to so demonstrate on a much less frail and elastic system like mortgage balance sheets?
Are you fucking stupid?
This can only be a temporary problem. If those guys have a properly functioning electricity market, energy storage companies will bite. Obviously, this would work much better if end-users/suppliers were actually billed the actual electricity price instead of some kind of average. That way, they could change their behavior to match it or even consider storing their self-produced electricity. This could get a major boost if the electricity prices would be available in real-time to your fridge, washing machine, car charger and solar batteries.
What could also help tremendously, is if the countries around them shared the same ambition. If not, they will keep stuffing the hole until a major electricity dip comes around sometime mid-winter and the Danes will blackout.
0x or or snor perron?!
There are real problems, but there are also solutions. You can do much more to control demand on shortish timescales. No one will notice or care if the aircon or heating to their huge office building switches off for a few minutes, or if their electric car only charges 90% of minutes it is plugged in for.
With a move towards renewable energy without sufficient energy storage will simply mean that the
backup energy suppliers will be mostly idle. Such idleness is costly, and it should reflect in the
energy price they can charge. So the political headache is telling the consumers, that on that
on that still, cloudy winters day, their energy price is 100 times the ordinary.
It may still be a good idea, but it require change.
Electricity _NOW_ is expensive in the day because of higher demand and not as much higher production.
But if these provide more electricity on the day and less in the night won't that just make nuclear and fossile plants more necessary and hence be able to charge higher in the night instead? Since there no solar energy then.
Or if needed if they could run in the winter and not in the summer.
As for car I think the solution of simply using the car as your battery was an interesting one too. Not perfect but if they are all hooked up to the grid too? :). Likely wears the battery though.
Somewhat OT, but... Denmark is very reliant on the tax revenue derived from "green taxes" to pay for it's vast social programs. So much so, that acting green is left to your conscience, and may actually cost you dearly. A few examples:
Taxes on cars are at roughly 180% this means that cars with new fuel-saving features become unfeasible, hybrids like the Toyota Prius is simply too expensive and almost none are sold in Denmark. 100% electric cars were excluded from the 180% tax, but this is bound to change as the Tesla S is selling well, and is generally considered a luxury car (which socialists generally hate, regardless of how "green" they are).
There is virtually no financial incentive to charge your Tesla at off-peak hours, because the tax on electricity is flat, and the market price of the electricity only make up 20%-30% of the price. For all intents and purposes, the cost of charging your tax-free Teslas batteries are the same whether you charge it at 7 pm (peak consumption, and powered by coal), or at 3am (when subsidized electrical wind power is sold at a loss to neighboring countries). In more developed countries, washer/dryers are set to run at off-peak hours, but no such advancements have been introduced in Denmark. It would be an easy thing to introduce, but the loss of tax revenue makes it impossible to introduce such a scheme.
A supermarket will generally let the hot air from the refrigeration systems into the atmosphere, because if they recycle the heat (to heat the store), they are labelled an energy producer, and will be levied with bureaucracy and taxes that far surpass any savings.
Installing solar panels is limited to 6K Watt per house for some reason.
Generally Denmarks ambition to be green is severely limited as the taxation levied on various services are (as you do) with the catch-all argument that the tax is added to "benefit the environment".
Remember we don't have battery technology that lasts forever, or really even for a long time. So you have to lifecycle those batteries, they will have to be replaced periodically. Probably once ever 5-10 years max. Well add in the cost of that now to the total cost. Also add in the energy required to create and dispose of said batteries to your calculation.
Ends up not being a great option with current battery technology.
Guess what? Cold places use MORE energy than warm ones. While people like to hate on ACs as some excess, they are actually quite efficient. Since they move heat, they can move more energy than they use. A good AC can easily move 3-5 watts of heat for each watt of energy it requires to operate. No such luck with heating systems, they at best get you 1 watt of heat for each watt they take.
Then there's the issue of temperature delta. If we take 25 degrees (C) as a target room temperature, well then you can see why cold places have it even worse. The hottest inhabited places on Earth only tend to reach 40 degrees regularly and peak at 50 rarely. So a 15-25 degree delta from normal. The cold places? Hell, even a "mildly" cold place hits 0, and they generally drop a good bit below that. Denmark sees 15-30 degrees below zero. So a 40-55 degree delta. Of course the bigger the delta, the more leakage you have, the more energy you need, etc.
If you intend that heating energy to be renewable, that means no oil, gas, etc furnaces. You can use electric, so long as the electricity is from a renewable source. I guess depending on your definition wood might be ok too. That's about it, unless you happen to live near some hotsprings and can get some geothermal heat.
So re-run the energy calculation when all the district and local heating has to stop using anything non-renewable.
It's good to remember that Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland have a shared power grid with a shared price pool. Some of those countries also have lines to trade with other countries. For example Finland has lines going to Russia & Estonia.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland form a rather large land mass, with different wind and weather characteristics. It's already common for us that prices in Finland fluxuate not only according to how much power we're generating, but also according to how much the other Nordic countries are generating. Norway & Denmark can easily supply wind power, while Finland can focus on hydro. Throw in a few nuclear power plants and the problem becomes a bit more balanced since different countries will produce different types of renewable energies, and since its over a large land area, even the current weather might be very different. The infrastructure to share that energy and a common power "exchange" is already in place.
I guess selling the largest energy provider and infrastructure in Denmark to Goldman Sachs is not going to help that goal.
We are now in a globalized world where the nations who adopt affordable and reliable sources of energy, which rules out most renewables, will be the ones experiencing economic growth and become the next economic superpowers. The nations who adopt renewable energy will be struggling just to keep the lights on and their houses warm during the winter. If a nation can only generate enough energy to barely meet its basic needs, economic stagnation and outsourcing will be the rule. Asia has no problem taking up the slack left behind by North America and Europe who are now are too busy hamstringing their own economies because of the existential guilt that extreme environmentalism has brought them.
http://rt.com/news/184600-isis...
http://cphpost.dk/news/danes-w...
http://www.gatestoneinstitute....
That is just retarded. Non-white immigrants and descendants of immigrants only make up 300,000 people in Denmark, or short of 6% of the population, and hasn't been raising since the immigration laws were tighten in the late 90s, and since then they have gone from tight to being outright silly, and no major political party is seriously trying to bring them back to sanity let alone the immigrant positive levels of the 20th century.
Somehow this fact has escaped the nationalist right wing, who rose to power to oppose the immigration policies of the 70-90s, but then admitting they already won would mean shuting down..
And your sources are:
- Russia Today, a Kremlin propaganda mouthpiece.
- Copenhagen Post, which despite being described as "neutral" is deeply tied to Jyllands-Posten which is well-known for its right-wing views.
- Gatestone Institute, a notorious neo-con and anti-muslim think tank.
TL;DR: You lose.
Eat the rich.
Actually, let me refute the very first statement from that Gatestone Institute rant:
Muslim immigrants in a town near Copenhagen have forced the cancellation of traditional Christmas displays this year even while spending lavishly on the Islamic Eid celebration marking the end of Ramadan.
This is completely false. Muslim "immigrants" (in reality second- and third-generation Danes with a non-Danish heritage) did not force the cancellation of traditional Christmas displays.
What actually happened is that the purchase and installation of a Christmas tree was put to the vote in the owners association, and since no one stepped up to manage the purchase and installation (despite there being plenty of non-muslims in the area) and because it was a large expense, it was voted down. And it was just the Christmas tree, all of the other Christmas celebrations were held as usual.
Also, they did not "spend lavishly" on the Eid celebrations, they held them in the exact same way that they've done for years, at a very reasonable spending level, completely comparable to the spending level for their Christmas celebrations.
Eat the rich.
1. any producer registering on the exchange has to declare both the maximum and the minimum that it can make available to the grid over a yearly period in 30 minutes interval;
2.additional payments to the grid are made by producers on a log scale proportional to the difference between the two, i.e.gas turbine plants, who have a continous productions, would make additional payments (in fact, receive less money) of zero, wind would probably declare a relatively small difference, solar would declare zero as a minimum, and therefore pay the most in reduced revenues;
3. by all means, allow those renewable producers that buy continous availability from others to declare it on a form countersigned by the guarantee producer.
In this manner, pricing of the interruption risk is paid by those who cause it, and the cause-effect relation is evident. Make no mistake, William of Occam is my master, and I am not in favour or against renewables: I treat the matter as the analyst I am, most of my job is "stripping the fudge" from numbers, i.e. analyse and take away the fiscal and regulatory incentives that mask the fact that something is unviable by making somebody else pay without telling him in so many words.This solution offered by the minister is a case in point. let me help there.
[...]"Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply.
that would give the final payer the false impression that the problem is about not having enough renewable energy continuosly, instead of saying that most renewables are inherently unstable sources per se. By making the continous producers making most of the revenue in the brief moments when they are indispensable, you are knowingly exposing them as ruthless speculators, gnawing away at the needs of the People all in the name of profit."Gas plant near Copenhaghen taxes a Citizen 200 EUR a day for its energy!", and so on. All the while making hush-hush deals and promises, to keep the "real" producers from closing the plants for good, we do not want the innocent Danes to know that there is no Tooth Fairy, do we? And if we work out the math for that citizen, i.e. that those 200 Euros are a lump sum insurance payment for energy availability, working out at 55 cents a day, and oh the horror, that the politicians knew this before work had begun on the renewable plants, that they will know.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
Fuck off and die you conspiracy theorists
Helping people become liberal and desiring of human rights, is an issue which has gotten entangled with ethnocentric nationalistic (what people call "far right") views.
Unfortunately this has meant that the multicultural movement has avoided questioning the far right wherever it is found (Europeans do not have a monopoly on being racists). This in turn has given more ammunition to the European far right to promote racism against foreigners. It is quite tragic really.
The only place to resolve this is to simply promote universal human rights for everyone. This is what many modern thinking Muslims are doing for example, they are questioning their own group's racism, sexism, homophobia, and tribalism, as well as European far right tribalism. Human rights are and should be universal. True for all. But it does seem to be happening, and the Myth of the Muslim Tide is, as the title of that book suggests, immigration is not a scary monster.
But it is important to note that European liberal multiculturalism has tended to label immigrants as being made of groups, and this has only made it harder for liberals inside those groups to escape the conservative entrenched opinions inside those groups, and to get out and support liberal values like equality for women.
Sorry if this post sounds a bit garbled, I am trying to address three points at once, to promote liberal values.
And your sources are: None what so ever.
You just engaged in a personal attack. The last resort for people who can't actually refute facts provided by someone they disagree with.
Norway is making a huge investment in storing Denmark's excess renewable energy and then sending it back to them when renewable production falls off:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/wind/norway-wants-to-be-europes-battery
Hehe. Yeah, the hill part is going to be difficult :)
For reference, this is the highest point in Denmark:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%B8lleh%C3%B8j#mediaviewer/File:Molleh%C3%B8j_from_Ejer_Bavneh%C3%B8j.JPG
A future your suicidal society richly deserves. Meanwhile, I drive a 6 passenger extended cab pickup to work alone every morning.
The human race is saved!
If no one else does anything about global climate change, at least the human race will survive in Denmark!
You know ... because of microclimates ... and stuff ...
And it was not an entire town, but an apartment bock. The money in question was money paid by the people living in those apartments, whose representatives voted against having a Christmas tree.
If the majority living there are Muslim, is it really a problem that they vote "we don't want to pay for a Christmas tree"?
Wait until the Windmills and Solar farms get few years on them. There will be maintenance costs.
We should be putting windmills on top of skyscrapers, where the wind is strongest and the need right below it.
From TFS:
Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run.
Umm... what? The main reason we use them so much is precisely because they are economical to run, at least as long as you don't consider any of the externalities involved. We use them because they are reliable and because we can (for now) ignore externalities so they are fiscally cheap. Plenty of problems with them but calling them uneconomical isn't really true except maybe on very long time scales.
I am curious how Denmark thinks they are going to fuel aircraft and large watercraft using only renewable energy sources. As far as I can tell those are engineering challenges we haven't really cracked yet.
So it's the fight between:
A. Nervous governments caught short on some cold winter's night with much too much wind so that powerlines are flying over the country but high energy prices.
B. Nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter's night with little wind and very low energy prices.
I prefer the latter.
Bio Diesel is ok for cars, it is less dirty than regular diesel. However making it a large fraction of your energy needs, requires a large fraction of your farm product.
So you will go hungry to stay warm. We have seen food fights in Mexico when the price of corn gets too high.
Yes a "MAGIC" battery, a huge leap in technology is needed to make wind viable as a large fraction of you production.
By increasing prices when demand approaches the absolute maximum supply, consumers will reduce demand quickly (good, since supply can't be increased quickly). When power gets expensive enough, they will shut off rooms, wear more sweaters, turn lights off, instead of cooking a fancy dinner they will nuke something in the microwave and use disposable utensils (or, just wait to wash them until the next day), they will sit around in a single room and talk instead of playing on their computer or watching TV in individual rooms.
People will do that ONCE and then they will bitch to their local politicians. The politicians, fearing that they will be voted out of office by a bunch of pissed off cold people, will bend over backwards to ensure that power is available regardless of the environmental consequences.
I live in the cold latitude. I say bring on the global warming!
Look, I live in a semi-urban area and I really like the fact that I have natural gas and electricity being piped in. Less stuff in my house to break down and to have to maintain on my own. This is the same reason the "cloud" services are the rage. We like it when somebody else takes care of things for us. And if they can do it better than us and cheaper, even better.
They could always import solar from the Sahara in the winter. If solar falls a lot in price, which it most likly will, this might become economical to do. They can use use battery storage to even out intaday and daily variations in power supply.
I am all for the environment but there are times I think those who are trumpeting the "renewable energy" are blowing smokes
Well, the transition is being forced no matter how difficult it will be; oil is running out and if we burn all the coal available, we will end up with an unbreathable oxygen-free atmosphere. Coal deposits exists for a reason - early plant life extracted that coal from an atmosphere consisting of only CO2, N and H2O. Even blackout weeks is better than unbreathable air - we had a life before electricity. Some people can still remember it.
So fossil fuel has to stop. It may linger on for a while as "backup power", but that too will have to go. Look at what the prices will be, if a coal/oil plant is not allowed to release CO2 into the atmosphere. (Store it all, put it to rest deep underground?) Then you will see that nuclear & green power will be the cheaper options. Nuclear waste is easier than CO2, the volumes are so much lower.
If you just store the majority of energy you generate and use that when the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing. Go either deep cycle lead acid, lithium ion, or even super capacitors if you're on the daring edge.
Well-kept batteries lasts for a long time. If 10% of your house cost is batteries, you will have a better battery management system than a generic cheap charger!
Short-lived batteries like lithium won't be the choice for this. Instead, we'll select long-lasting chemistries. A house battery buried below the cellars won't have to be lightweight or portable or fast-charging. It need to store tremendous charges over long time. Not that hard, when you give up on "lightweight". Lithium is for cars and portable devices.
Bad assumptions.
You don't need cloudless sky for solar panels. Denmark has way more than 5 hours of usable daylight. Other bad assumption was starting to bash solar at all, It's all about wind in Denmark.
If only we had a device that could store electricity in a box for later use.
Jokes aside.
All we need is more investment and technological breakthroughs in large scale battery storage, for use in global electricity storage. Something i'am surprised Tesla hasnt sunk their money into.
"The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed"
That is total bullshit and everyone knows it.
My county imposes a surtax on hybrid and electric vehicles to make up for the loss of taxes that are normally collected through the sale of gasoline (sales tax and road tax). So, instead of paying ~$300/year in annual property tax on a $19,000 Nissan Altima that gets 37MPG on the highway, you can pay $750/year in annual property tax on a $40,000 Hybrid that gets maybe 50MPG on the highway.
Panels and windmills fail or are broken by nature, just like the parts in normal plants. Wind turbines require regular mechanical maintenance (manpower + resources). Solar panels still suffer from efficiency fade over time, last I heard. Saying renewable power sources cost nothing to run is disingenuous at best.
Maybe those would be an option for home use since their size and weight wouldn't matter.
Last I checked, Denmark is already filling in their holes by using Norwegian hydro.
Effectively, when Denmark has a surplus, they sell it to Norway and Norway throttles back generation at their dams (allowing water to back up in the reservoirs a bit).
Of course, because this is a surplus and Norway doesn't really need it (other than effectively saving it in their reservoirs), it's sold to Norway cheap.
When Denmark has a shortfall, they buy back energy from Norway, but because demand is high, the price is high.
At least as of 2-3 years ago, no country had achieved more than 20-25% grid penetration of wind/solar. Denmark was the highest percentage, and to achieve their high percentage, they were critically dependent on Norwegian hydro resources as a form of "battery". There's only so far you can take hydro-based storage though.
That's the big problem with renewables - we just don't have the energy storage technology yet to make them feasible.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
This is what I was thinking, and they don't need hills. A lot of Denmark is near or below sea level. They are an expert at flood control and land reclamation from the sea. They can build walls in the sea to create artificial valleys. Pump water out when they have plenty of energy and let it fall back in when they don't. They have plenty of inlets to block off for this endeavor, thou one or two is probably more than enough for the country.
Imagine a wide road that crosses an inlet. On it are wind mills (and a few more out to sea), possibly augmented by a solar roof, and below it is a Dam. The wind and solar pump out the inlet with excess power, and the electric dam lets it back in.
Let's look at the strengths and weaknesses of each type of power:
Coal/Oil/Gas:
+ Fast to spin up
+ Can produce exactly the amount of power needed
- Makes Captain Planet cry
Nuclear (fission):
+ Produces a lot of energy
- Doesn't throttle well
- Pollution problems solvable, but not currently solved
Hydro/Tidal:
+ Relatively reliable output of power
+ Hydro dams can be used as storage (pump water back up when it's cheap, let it drop again when needed)
- Reliant on geography
- Hydro dams are expensive
- Hurts fish
Geothermal:
+ Reliable power output
+ Usually no pollution
- Only works in some areas
Solar/Wind:
+ The greenest
- Not reliable
- Tends to produce most when price is cheapest
Nuclear (fusion):
+ Clean, reliable and powerful
- Doesn't exist yet
From this, you can easily see that you can only get a homogenous power grid that works by using fossil fuels or massive storage. Everything else has problems either with reliability (solar/wind/tidal), throttling (nuclear), or geography (hydro/tidal/geothermal). Since storing electricity is hard, it is obvious that some sort of hybrid system is necessary.
The base load should be handled by geothermal, tidal, hydro, and nuclear, in that order (which is both how green they are, and how strict they are in where they have to be located). These produce reliable amounts of power. Tidal is a bit weird in that it's cyclical and not continuous, but that's not as much buffering needed, and it doesn't synch up with solar/wind.
Peak load should be handled by solar and wind, buffered by a reasonable amount of storage. Long-distance superconducting lines might also mitigate the problems - if it's cloudy in Paris, see if it's sunny in Tripoli.
And yes, there's still a place for fossil fuels. They're your last-line-of-defense system. Keep a few plants idling, to handle any peak load that spills over from solar/wind. Keep another few mothballed, able to be brought up within, say, a week. That way if your wind production gets wrecked by a hurricane, you can get back on your feet quickly.
When tens of GW of power generation goes offline in the UK for several months because of an accident and potential for more? Where tens of GW of power generation stops because they can't get cool water for the reactors in a French summer?
Yeah, right. Renewables aren't 100% available therefore aren't viable, but nuclear and coal (recent fire at a coal fired power station, gas powered stations taken offline when russia closed their pipeline one winter) are "reliable".
Yeah.
Right.
Arson, car burning and such. Soon THAT will be their primary energy source.
Look, energy production is hard stuff, and the reporter here clearly didn't understand ANY of the intricacies.
Basically the situation is this: you have a consumption curve that you need to meet at every instance. It is important to understand that this is a curve with daily peaks. These peaks MUST be met or you get riots in the streets.
If you erect a wind turbine it will produce power as the wind blows. Same with solar and the sun. When you match the resulting production curve up against the consumption curve, there will be gaps that you need to fill in some other way.
Nuclear power is a bad way to fill the gaps. Due to high capital costs, to stay economical a nuclear plant usually needs to produce 100% all the time until it needs refueling (which takes a month I think) where it will produce 0%, in other words a flat line with some clearly defined gaps. But we need to match a curve with gaps, so a flat line doesn't help much.
Instead you need something you can dispatch relatively quickly without costs going through the roof. Currently stuff like hydro, biogas, biomass, etc.
In Denmark, besides all the wind turbines we have a bunch of big coal plants. These plants are currently being transitioned to biomass (i.e. wood pills and chips) and will fill in the gaps, as well as produce heat for district heating (which is really big in Denmark, winter's cold up here).
If these plants get into financial trouble, the national grid operator Energinet can increase a fee on each kWh (the PSO) and use the extra income to pay some of the plants for standby services. Besides this, we have really good grid connections to Norway where they have a ton of quickly dispatchable hydro. The connections to Norway are a two-way street - they get cheap wind turbine power in return which makes it easier for them to get through the winter without running out of water (very little water flows to the dams in winter because it's frozen).
Hence, apart from the transportation sector where we're waiting for Tesla and the like to come up with better electric cars, there really isn't anything tricky or hard about the transition away from fossil fuels in Denmark.
It was tricky in the past because wind turbines used to be expensive, but the industry has matured and wind is now the cheapest source of new (undispatchable) kWhs. Really, the only political question left is whether we should try to save some of the biomass by building more off-shore wind turbines.
It's also true that our current path is a bit more expensive than a fossil-based base scenario - I think it's supposed to be around 100-200 USD per inhabitant per year in 2050. So not overwhelmingly expensive.
Why the hell would anyone allow biodiesel to be used when it generates carbon dioxide
Because biodiesel is made from vegetable oil, whose production pulls carbon dioxide out of the air during photosynthesis. The negative emission of production plus the positive emission of consumption sums roughly to a net zero emission.
TFS says "The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed..." but this is incorrect for wind turbines that have oil in the gearbox assembly.
Wind turbines in cold weather need to be heated so the oil remains fluid. This power has to come from a steady source (not wind) so the turbines can wind up consuming more power than they generate.
Reference
...claim that their plans are perfectly feasible, indeed, cheap as well. They didn't need traditional engineers, they could do with visionary activists.
Now let's watch the whole scam that is 'sustainable, renewable' energy collapse around their heads..
Is to nationalize the electric utilities, then they don't need to be run to make a profit fo their CEOs and venture capitalists. Then running them at cost, or a modest "surplus", would also cut costs, and prevent sudden shutdowns by aforesaid CEOs and investors....
mark "but the libertarians here would rather pay through the nose (but none of *them* live near a coal-fired
power plant)"
Large scale internal combustion engines are extremely efficient and can run on just about anything burnable: vegetable oil, powdered coal, agricultural dust, wood gas from trees, dried leaves, etc. Yes, you can literally run an engine on banana peels. The trick is to get the carburetor to get the balance right.
From the perspective of a generator for a hospital, it would be relatively straightforward to design a generator running an engine like this with whatever renewable fuel is most convenient and readily available locally. Large scale wood gas installations typically work with fuel pre-processed into pellets.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If you are having troubles in the dead of winter, you may want to provide incentives to combined heat and power. Variable pricing is a good thing as well if feasible to move storage onto the site where it can be used later. (Right now losses involved with most storage makes grid-level redistribution a losing propsition). A embedded device in the home will forcast demand and recieve the focasts. It will then decide the cheapest way to meat the demand (either by precharching it's stores, storing onsite gneration, starting onsite generation, or just pulling from the grid) and update it's demand projections. You would eventually lose most convential coal plants from the grid as renewable are added as they just can't cycle very well. You'd see baseline supliments move towards Natural Gas. Anyways to get residential consumers to accept this level of trade you would need strong legal and technical privacy protections (Cypto methods and laws that inact strict penalties for sharing any information personally identifiable and more granular than daily demand and productions) Providing the framework to an open market is going to have much better long-term success than nationizing all electric utilites.
and keep subsidizing our free ride. At some indeterminate point in the future, we will come to your home and kill you in your sleep because you're not righteous and green.
"The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed,"
Um, what?
Pump water up a mountain during the day and then let it go at night.
This actually works and is reduced to practice.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
Scotland plans to have 100% renewable energy by 2020. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/news/releases/2011/05/18093247
> The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run [...]
Wait, what? Maybe on the very short term, but with a significant number of units in play, maintenance and replacement are going to be pretty much a continuous cost.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Perhaps you should have pointed out as well that a Christmas tree is not a christian thing anyway but a nordic/germanic (no idea why the english speaking call it teutonic) thing.
On the other hand it is sad that "winter trees" seem to die out in scandinavia/germania ... after all it was one of the biggest contributions of 'us' to the world of celebrations! And yes: it is not a christian thing, the stupid priests hijacked it from us. I'm surprised that is in that high custom in the US.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oh boo whoo, your racist bullshit got called out and now you're mad. Go cry me a river.
My source is that I actually live in Denmark, right in the middle of the Greater Copenhagen Area where most of these supposed problems should be, and you know what? It's all bullshit, there are no such "widespread" and "endemic" problems.
I meet plenty of muslims (along with hindus, sikhs and plenty of other denominations) in my daily life, and you know what? They're all every bit as friendly, courteous and non-outwardly-religious as the average christian. And a bunch of my friends live in the "troubled" areas of Copenhagen (Mjølnerparken, Tingbjerg), so don't give me any crap about "only visiting the nice neighborhoods. The bad parts of places like Vesterbro still have a problem, but it's not related to muslims at all, it's mostly related to trafficked prostitutes and their pimps.
Of course there are a handful of street gangs, but we've got whites-only biker gangs that are every bit as bad or worse, so how is that an immigration problem? And of course there are some religious nutcases who like to condemn everyone else to hell, but there are just as many on the christian side of things, the only different is that they're a little less blunt in their exclamations, but their intentions are identical.
TL;DR: Unless you live here, don't make assumptions about what it's actually like.
Eat the rich.
Oh yeah, I really should have included that fact.
My general stance on the whole Christmas thing is "I'll stop taking Christ out of Christmas, if you stop forcing him into my Yule".
Eat the rich.
You use portfolios as insurance pools to reduce risk. They DO NOT WORK if you remove all the "under performing" members because while more expensive sometimes, they are there for risk and features that better performing members fail at. It's called "diversity" (in exactly the same sense as the biological term). If you try to absolutely minimize or eliminate any cost, inventory, CO2 or any other parameter, you end up with a local minima but it is one that is unsustainable against environmental change (which includes economic, climate or demographic changes).
It boggles my mind how stupid people can get about this. But we have "profit maximization", "zero tolerance", "zero inventory" and other extremely dangerous short-sighted strategies abounding in the world today.
HA HA HA!
What a ridiculous and stupid statement. From the perspective that they do not burn "fuel" that might seem like a true statement, but it is far from the actual truth. Wind/Solar, you need to install, hundreds, thousands of these things. They all require maintenance. They also have a limited lifespan and will need eventual replacement. Anyway, I think it is funny that the renewable lovers seem to always want to talk about TCO in comparison to nuclear facilities, but conveniently forget to bring it up in regards to more conventional energy sources.
They also forget to bring up the fact that there like everywhere to spurn growth in renewable energy governments offer both secured loans for nothing, and long term contracts that subsidize the industry using much higher cost. So these companies are basically printing money with little risk. They only economic problem is capitol costs, which has been totally mitigated. If your wondering why the other generation sources are having trouble competing, it isn't hard to figure out. Also if you haven't taken into consideration the base load capacity you need to maintain to electrify your grid, and don't understand that renewables are inappropriate for that usage (because A) it isn't always windy or sunny, and B) storing energy is difficult), you probably shouldn't be doing the energy planning for a nations future.
The problem with nuclear and coal and gas failing is due to renewables, and the problem with renewables is that they fail and THAT is due to renewables.
They aren't spending anywhere near the amount they need to renew capacity, WHETHER RENEWABLE OR NOT, therefore IT IS NOT the problem of these mythical "eco loons" that have you frothing at the mouth in rabid fury (now THERE is a loon for you, in the FUCKING MIRROR, MORON). It's that they don't want to spend money now for more money later, since spending now reduces THIS QUARTER'S financial report.
In a few years time, when it falls over, the ones making most will move on and screw up the business of another area all over again.
Oh, that's right, never.
So really why do you claim a need for PERFECTION with renewables but not traditional power?
BECAUSE YOU'RE A MORON.