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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.
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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?
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).
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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.
The round trip efficiency of hydrogen storage is only 30% to 50%. That means that you would have to put in two to three times the energy that you get out. In the base of that electricity stored in hydrogen will cost 2 to 3 times as much a usual.
Secondly hydrogen is difficult to store in large quantities. It leaks through solid steel and unless cryogenicly stored has a very low energy density.
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?!
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?
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.
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.
Lets use some German numbers
Nein!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
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.