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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.
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:
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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.)
Solar panels still generate electricity under cloudy conditions. In fact, it actually increases the diffuse radiation. Sure direct normal radiation decreases, but the cloud cover allows for reflection of radiation back down from the sky that is not insignificant. I live in an area that is regularly overcast and PV performs quite well in this area. In this situation I would be more concerned about obstructions (shading).
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
I understand we're all geeks here. However, I think we can be expected to have a basic academic knowledge of environmental facts. For example, even though from my basement I may see very little of The Big Fireball in the Sky, I still know, based on YouTube videos, that clouds don't entomb us in pitch darkness.
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?!
Not such a good idea if "giving it a go" means electricity bills that are not affordable by a significant portion of the population and days where all electricity is shut off. Risking a country's economy on "a go" is not good policy.
There is a tool at http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg... for estimating the lost efficiency of solar panels due to clouds etc. For Denmark it gives about 27%. From wikipedia efficiency of commercial cells is typically 21.5%, so about 200 W/m^2. So after losses lets say 140 W/m^2 times half the time (the sun is up on average) so 70 W/m^2 average over the year. There are about 7000 hours in the year, so we get about 500 KWh/m^2/yr.
The total energy consumption of Denmark (wikipedia, and probably not including vehicle fuel) is about 200 TWh/yr (and dropping steadily), so that's about 400 million m^2, or a 20 km square.
Now no one is suggesting using purely PV solar for a whole country, but it does suggest that replacing all roofs with solar roofs, or covering a few large redundanct industrial parks would get you quite a lot of the way.
Actually Denmark is open and windy, so wind is a much better call there.
They will complain if the HVAC is off for an extended time or their car in not charged enough to get to work and back. We are not talking about shortages that last a few minutes at a time but maybe a few hours or a few days.
The think you both miss is that on January the sun is much lower on the horizon causing solar panels to produce much less electricity. From these real like German numbers solar panels produced 0.8TWh in January and 4.9TWh in June. The production capacity in January was only 16% of June.
Replacing all roofs is not that great as north facing roofs would only get indirect sunlight and east/west facing roofs would only be viable half the day. Then there are the roofs that are in the shade of other buildings or trees. Just because light is hitting a solar panel does not mean that it producing anywhere near capacity.
Also, do you have any idea the cost of that many PVs?
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".
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.
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.
Lets use some German numbers
Nein!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
It is too cheap at times. When everything is going well there is a lot of wind energy available. The problem is that when winds ate too high or too low it is very difficult to compensate for. The conventinal plants needed to back up renewable are not viable because they are used only when needed yet still have all the fixed maintenance costs. We don't have an electricity generation problem we have an electricity storage and distribution problem.
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.