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.

Comments

Use the money you save

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Use the money you save

[AmiMoJo]

Denmark is connected to the rest of Europe. Wide geographic distribution should mean that few conventional plants are required once renewable capacity is high enough.

Hospitals and other vital services will of course be allowed to use fossil fuels. Let's not be silly about this, there will always be exceptions for safety reasons, it's just that the vast majority of the energy will be renewable and there will be no big fossil fuel plants any more.

Re:Use the money you save

[rioki]

You know bio diesel exists? Just use that as a fallback with ye olde diesel generator. I see totally no reason why infrastructure should collapse in a blackout without fossil fuels. Now there are good and valid concerns why you don't want to use wide scale bio diesel use, for example in cars, but that does not mean you can't use it as an energy buffer for critical infrastructure. Batteries are almost never a good idea, they are expensive and quite nefarious for the environment when at their end of life. You only really want/need batteries as a buffer until the generator kicked in.

It is all about baseload

[aepervius]

You need a certain amount during the whole day, without blackout or too many brownout. The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable. Only conventional power allows power generation predictions. Thus only conventional is at the moment doable for baseload. There are projects to have either chemical, thermal or even physical battery (think of water reservoir put in heigth, pump up when usage is low, let fall down and generate when electricity demand is high), but all of those needs an enormous amount of investiments. Basically also you would probably need a multiple of the generation you require, to be able at least to store for "bad days" and smooth over generations. Basically this also require a huige investments. Even germany found out quite quickly that beyond a certain amount of renewable you hit limits. Ask yourself why they reverted to brown coal/lignite instead of expanding the renewable generations by a factor.

So

Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having

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).

Pump water instead

[aberglas]

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.)

Re:Home storage

[AmiMoJo]

Fortunately in the winter other sources ramp up, such as wind and thermal gradient. Having batteries at home still makes a lot of sense because you can charge them up at night when demand is low and electricity is cheap. It's a nice way of getting a lot of storage into the grid in a way that benefits consumers rather than big energy companies.

Re:Are renewable energy generators up to task ?

[macpacheco]

The real problem with solar isn't clouds, its the winter. In high summer solar PV is producing 8-9 hours worth of its peak capacity, but in the winter it comes down to less than 2 (to be generous). Oh, so wind blows stronger in the winter, but there is a bell curve of possibilities and there will be "perfect storm of lack of wind events" every whatever years, when the wind will be weak over very large areas, for a day, when solar is producing close to nothing.
The main concern is very serious, a country with a large mix of solar and wind still needs a large dispatchable power generation capacity to make up for the supply-demand gaps, but if those peaking power sources are only needed for a few days per year, its not economical to keep them open !
That's why I think the right mix is solar-wind-nuclear-geothermal-biomass-hydro. Specially baseload geothermal/nuclear and peaking biomass, it brings some sanity to this model of intermittent solar+wind power sources, unless your country have lots of hydro, with lots of hydro a solar-wind-hydro mix might be achievable with total stability.
That's the problem of having the environmentalists dictate the energy policy without much respect for the people that really keep the lights on, the transmission and generation electrical engineers. They aren't happy at all with this insanity, cause they know in the end they will be blamed if the lights go out.

Re:Ok but that's electricity, not energy

[Your.Master]

I wouldn't take 25 degrees C as the target room temperature.

I would rather use room temperature as the target room temperature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

You probably come from somewhere warm if you take 25 C as a target. Someone from somewhere cold might be perfectly comfortable going less than room temperature (and also wearing a sweater -- you can bundle yourself up to a greater than you can strip down).

You should also note that indoors is already warmer than the outdoors due both to waste heat from electric equipment and the humans inside, combined with the insulation (which tends to be much higher in cold places).

The other consideration here is it's simply easier to heat with alternative energy sources. Such as wood. Right now my heating and A/C are on the fritz due to some water damage and I'm using a wood fireplace.

The counter here would be that sources like solar are also more fruitful on warm days.

This said, I am aware of the recent findings that, at least in the US, heating tends to be more energy expensive than cooling. That's even easier to believe if you're all cranking it to 25.

Re:Ok but that's electricity, not energy

[mrvan]

Heating and cooling is not symmetrical.

For one, it gets coldest during the night, when most people are in bed and blankets are a good tool to stay warm. It gets hottest in the middle of the day when most people are up and about (in countries without a siesta culture).

Also, isolating a house to keep in heat is much easier than isolating it to keep heat out, especially if you want to keep windows etc.

Third, warm clothing allows you to operate comfortably even if it is cold, a warm sweater means a room of around 18 celcius / 65 fahrenheit is comfortable. Stripping down is more difficult, but especially less acceptable in a business environment. Current business fashion originates in Northeastern Europe during the 'little ice age' of the 18th century, wearing a three piece suit with shirt, undershirt and tie is much more suited for 18/65 than for 25/77 degrees.

I live in Amsterdam and have the thermostat set to 19/66 degrees when I am at home, it cools down to something like 16 degrees during the night. I don't have A/C but in the summer the temperature easily goes up to 25/77 degrees in house, which is fine with light clothing. On hot summer days it can go up to 30/86 degrees, which is too hot to be comfortable for me, but that is quite rare.

Finally, Denmark might 'see' 15-30 degrees below zero once every century, but average low (night) temperature in January is more like -2. So, a delta of also around 15-20 degrees from room temperature.