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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
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
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.
This is a permanent problem, and one that they were warned about, repeatedly. Greens in the government just pretended it doesn't exist until it's now hitting them square in their faces. Germany is hitting the same problem with Energiewende right now.
The situation is this. Denmark produces mostly wind power nowadays. Wind power is installed mainly offshore. That means that they have huge peaks and huge offtime. Europe had wholesale electricity prices set on electricity exchanges for years now. What that means is that large producers and users buy and sell energy based either off current price, or long term contracts that usually take those peaks into account.
For actual producers, this means that free market sets the price. I.e. when wind blows and everyone is creating a huge peak, electricity price can actually dive into negative for reasons I'll outline in a moment. And when it's down due to too much or too little wind, you have a huge demand for electricity to replace the lost load driving the prices up.
Now for the reason for negative pricing on electricity. Normally renewables like wind functioning in fully free market would be massively unprofitable when installed in sufficient numbers because they would all produce at once > price collapses due to massive supply and lack of demand > they never get a good price on their electricity. And at the same time when they cannot produce any energy, only base power kinds of power plants produce energy and get to net a premium.
So how do you make renewables make money when they can only sell when price is cheap and not when it's more expensive? The answer in Denmark and Germany has been to legislate priority tiers depending on your "greenness". Essentially, not a single watt of non-renewable energy can be sold on exchange until all of renewable capacity has been sold. At the same time, same legislation prevents reliable non-renewables and renewables from spinning down their plants while they legally cannot sell anything they produce. The result is absurd. They end up paying just to get someone take the power they have to produce off their hands. Hence negative electricity prices during peak times for non-renewables who can sell their electricity on the exchange after renewables took all the offers with actual money on the table.
This obviously leads to the problem where it's unprofitable to keep the non-renewable plants operating, so operators just shut down the plant. Except that woops, if they do, you have grid blackouts as a regular occurrence because there's not enough base power when wind isn't blowing and you actually stand to lose the entire grid to a blackout. Something that is unheard of in modern Northern Europe.
TL;DR Essentially, the reality is that the market is functioning too well, and as a result to make renewables profitable legislators had to massively shaft everyone else with punitive measures. And now that everyone else has been penalized into unprofitability and want out of the business, the brutal reality of the fact that wind is dysfunctional as base power is starting to hit everyone in their faces.
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.
It's somewhat like buying a last minute airline ticket. If people were unwilling to pay more for a last minute ticket, all tickets would cost more (fine) but it would be impossible (because the airlines would price tickets to insure every seat was sold - or oversold - many hours before wheels up to minimize the risk of a single empty seat) to get a ticket on a commercial airliner to get to mom's bedside 1500 miles away before she expires.
Airline tickets are an interesting one; and other products that have a relatively inflexible supply - i.e. the costs of flying the plane are basically the same whether or not that seat is sold, and similarly you can't sell more seats than you have, so the supply is inflexible. There are two opposing forces at work here:
1. The airline wants to ensure that every seat is sold, since filling a seat at the last minute increases profit, even if it is sold for below cost (the plane is flying anyway, the costs can't be avoided, selling the seat rather than flying with it empty is beneficial no matter how cheaply you sell it). This is going to tend to push the prices down for "last minute" sales as the airline tries to attract sales.
2. The passengers that need to get somewhere at short notice are willing to pay a premium. This is going to push the "last minute" prices up as the airlines cash in on this willingness to pay over the odds.
Figuring out which of these forces wins is certainly a non-trivial exercise.
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. Demand is extremely elastic, supply is inelastic at the top end. In extreme cases, they will shutdown their entire house (using winter shutdown procedures as needed) and gather in friends and neighbor's houses (perhaps, splitting the cost of the very expensive power during those times).
I think expecting people to monitor electricity prices on a minute by minute basis and change what they are doing _now_ is (largely) not realistic - virtually no one is going to look at the electricity price before deciding to put the TV on, for example. What is realistic is getting people into a routine - if people know that it's always cheaper for them to put the dish washer / washing machine / whatever on over night, then a reasonable proportion of them will probably choose to do so. In fact we've had this in the UK for decades - you can subscribe to an "Economy 7" tariff, which gives you more expensive than normal power during the day and then 7 hours of cheap power each night. Unfortunately the "more expensive than normal during the day" bit tends to make it an unrealistic tariff for anyone who doesn't use electric storage heaters.
I can, however, see a possibility for automated algorithms deciding when to use power - e.g. telling the dishwasher "automatically do the washing up when it'll be cheapest" and having it sit there monitoring the instantaneous electricity prices and automatically doing the right thing. Or loading the washing machine with instructions like "this washing needs to be done some time in the next 3 days, do it when the power is cheapest". This is essentially the same as having computers doing stock-market trading. The interesting bit will be when many people have the same device and they all decide the power is cheapest at the same time, causing a surge in demand and raising the prices.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.