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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?
Cost is one factor, a 50kWh battery is about over 25,000 USD -- about $500 per kWh for lithium ion car batteries. Projected cost by 2025 is about $160 per kWh, so only $8,000 in in 2025
It does not last a few days of intensive use either. Avg US household use is in 2012 was 10,837 kWh per year, or about 29.7 hWh per day, so 50kWh is less than 2 days..
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.
Lets use some German numbers
Nein!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.