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86 Percent of New Power in Europe From Renewable Sources in 2016 (theguardian.com)
Renewable energy sources made up nearly nine-tenths of new power added to Europe's electricity grids last year, in a sign of the continent's rapid shift away from fossil fuels. From a report on The Guardian: But industry leaders said they were worried about the lack of political support beyond 2020, when binding EU renewable energy targets end. Of the 24.5GW of new capacity built across the EU in 2016, 21.1GW -- or 86% -- was from wind, solar, biomass and hydro, eclipsing the previous high-water mark of 79% in 2014. For the first time windfarms accounted for more than half of the capacity installed, the data from trade body WindEurope showed. Wind power overtook coal to become the EU's second largest form of power capacity after gas, though due to the technology's intermittent nature, coal still meets more of the blocâ(TM)s electricity demand.
Clearly this evil, and an attack on fine upstanding God-fearing fossil fuel companies who have been so victimized by the evil uber-wealthy climatologists out to make the world into a Stone Age Communist Collective. Won't somebody think of the Kochs?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
And how do you expect the populations to handle when probabilities line up and you have outages because there is no way to handle the base load? You don't. You tell these people that they will have to make "sacrifices" to lower their standards of living. Social engineering, ladies and gentlemen.
When the new power gets to the point that the amount of power produced is not small compared to the existing sources, this will be interesting-- the grid will have to adapt to the time-variable sources.
I find blocâ(TM)s are very demanding
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
I have no idea what the actual number is, but the legacy non-renewable systems will vastly outweigh the new renewable. But it is definitely a step in the right direction.
I think we should stop posting topics and just post the most relevant XKCD to the issue. Would save a lot of effort.
I checked and the USA was even lower at only 61.5% of new capacity being renewable. I was surprised there was any non-renewable being built new. If we truly started "phasing out" non-renewables then you would expect new capacity to be 100% renewable or even above 100% (if existing non-renewable plants were being shut down). I didn't realize we were still building *any* new coal/gas plants. I knew the existing ones were still being used but surprised that they were still building new ones. I'm surprised with as much renewable that is being built that our energy usage is going up fast enough to need that much new energy.
The "new capacity" is on top of the existing base load power plants. So when they do generate you might save some fossil fuel, when they don't generate there's not a problem.
That said, when people speak of "capacity" you can be sure they're blowing smoke. Actual generated megawatt hours is what matters; capacity means nothing, especially solar capacity in northern, cloudy areas like Europe
While the 86% sounds great, what is the kWh adjusted number? It could be as low as 45% with that metric. kWh is king in terms of pollution.
I don't get it, what's the spin? Are you just disappointed it said New Power instead of White Power?
The grid doesn't have to adapt. The grid doesn't have to be stable. Politicians are a lot more interested in rewarding their funders than they are in you having stable electrical power.
Those numbers probably just mean new plants that produce power, not net capacity increases. It makes sense to shutter an older, less efficient (or more expensive to repair) fossil fuel plant and to replace it with newer natural gas combined cycle equipment.
I have no idea what the actual number is
Then by all means make up statistics rather than googling it, why don't change your username to Trump? :)
In 2014 renewable energy made up 25.4% of all energy production in the EU.
Source: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/s...
Now don't be fooled there is lots of similar stats here, like:
Renewable energy sources accounted for a 12.5 % share of the EU-28’s gross inland energy consumption in 2014.
(Presumably because not all energy is consumed, read the details if you care, but read before you bash).
The goal remains:
The EU seeks to have a 20 % share of its gross final energy consumption from renewable sources by 2020
Similarly, in 2014, the US was a 11%, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
(note. don't confuse electricity production for total energy production).
All these stats are from 2014, clearly things a better now, given most new energy production facilities are renewable.
Yeah totally, so that way the US can be a couple of decades behind, still be pumping massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, and end up with a backwards economy.
That's how the US succeeded, by sitting on its fucking ass.
That's exactly what we did with digital TV.
While other countries were rolling out their own specs, the US held back and waited a couple of years. When we decided to switch the technology had grown more capable, new algorithms for compression and such were available, and ...we leapt ahead of everyone else in the world.
As far as the CO2 thing, that's probably a marketing issue. The people worried about that haven't done an effective job of presenting their case to the rest of the country. I'm not saying their case is *wrong*, just that it was ineffectively presented. The arguments are largely based on insults and derision, hyperbolic doom and gloom, and suppression of dissent. It's hard for people to get behind a message presented that way.
Our country went from great to backwards over the last 20 years or so under the globalism model, starting with NAFTA (1994) and continuing to other countries. It's highly likely that continuing that same model would have driven us further into 3rd world status, but we've recently changed course.
There's no guarantees, but plotting a different economic course might bring us back to 1st world status. We'll have to wait a couple of years to see if this works - if not, we can try something else. It's fairly clear that doing the same thing harder would only hasten our destruction.
of New Power to an Old Power is..?
Not true at all.
Hydro has as good responsiveness as gas, and Scandinavia has 120TWh of storage capacity. That's why the CEO of 50Hertz Transmission GmbH believes in 80% renewables in the future.
with regards to the actual R&D, German companies can take credit for industry standard wind turbine, PV, and inverter technology.
I'll challenge that. German companies may have done the industrialiation of wind turbines, but when you're talking about the "actual R&D", they built on the R&D that was done at NASA, who built the first multi-megawatt scale wind turbine back in the mid 1970s, when the biggest production units were 20 kW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And the same is true of PV technology-- today's low cost panels are all outgrowth of the technologies developed in the Low Cost Solar Array (LSA) project (later renamed Flat-Plate Solar Array project) run by JPL and DOE in the 70s to early 1980s: http://authors.library.caltech...
We should give some credit to the Australians as well, particularly the group at University of New South Wales under Martin Green that did a lot of work pushing solar panel efficiency up. But the Germans? Yes, they did some good work too, but the US and Australian research really drove the field.
Your comment makes no sense.
Yes people want green energy and these stats show that they are getting what they want.
Boo hoo, what horrible cheerleading.
WUT?
Much of the new non-renewable capacity is upgrades to old stuff. For example, in Germany they are closing old coal power stations and replacing them with a smaller number of new ones, which are cleaner (but still suck) and better able to follow load and thus help support renewables.
Since they only count new builds and don't subtract all the old stuff going offline, you get 86%.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And, with pumped water dams, you get hydro that's basically powered by renewables. You can have your wind farms or solar installations powering pumps that push water back up into a reservoir, and then let the water out to spread it over peak times or when renewable systems aren't producing power. I've even been hearing of variations on the theme; pumped gravel systems, even using something boxcars on rails, just about anything that can be pushed up any kind of incline, and then dropped in a controlled fashion, could work. There's also flywheels, which have been around for a long time.
There's this obsession among the anti-renewable (read oil companies and the idiots that repeat their memes) that energy storage means big fucking battery piles, and maybe that will be the case, but there's no reason you can't use mechanical storage systems.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All of these stories about the uptake in renewables have these funny phrasings that seem to indicate they are cherrypicking to get the numbers they want.
I don't doubt that wind/solar/etc are being installed in increasing numbers, but the way these figures are presented have a "the chocolate ration has been increased" quality to them.
For years, politicians were (publicly) in a state of denial about fossil fuel supplies while they proclaimed that fusion would soon solve all of life's problems.
Fusion using tokamaks as currently envisioned isn't sustainable even in theory, but they would be huge, centralized power sources that governments could easily control (thus, the only sort that gets any funding, whether viable or not. ) Fission power has too many problems, and would take a few decades to make a difference at best. No other source of utility scale power is more than a stopgap measure.
Somewhere in the last few years a lot of important people realized that business as usual will result in a collapsed civilization, soon. They had to do something, quickly but quietly. Admitting that we really are running out of petroleum or that practical fusion power is not going to happen in the foreseeable future would have bad social consequences.
The rush to renewables amounts to a last ditch hope of buying time, without admitting just how bad our situation actually is. They can only hope that owning one's own power source will be less popular if cheap commercial power is available again. Cheap that is, until the solar arrays and windmills rust away.
After all US got (for some time) an unfair advantage of using dirty energy to produce goods.
We still need coal for base and peak-power though, and new plants are still build, though mainly to replace old dirtier coal plants.
Nuclear could become (with magic and prayers) cheap and renewable as farts - it will still be a security risk.
"Yeah but this new reactor design..." doesn't matter either.
You still have to build nuclear reactors in places where there will most likely be social upheavals resulting in wars in the next 50 years.
Cause those are the places where most people are being born, which means more energy needs, which means more powerplants - built in future Syrias.
Did someone say ISIS dirty bombs? Anyone? Anyone? NSA?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You mean like an AC that doesn't offer any counterargument?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I was surprised there was any non-renewable being built new.
Why would you be? We still need baseload power and so far renewables that are easily accessible to any country have yet to step up to this claim. The Dutch just brought a new coal plant online early 2016. Nice and new CCS technology, base load, but non-renewable none the less. Natgas based peaking plants are cropping up everywhere, and the French are still working on major nuclear projects.
You won't get 100% renewables until you solve the baseload / peaking problem. That won't happen for a while yet.
As soon as you have an high enough level of wind and solar, traditional base load is no longer needed, as it is replaced by wind and solar.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Slashdotters should know by now that irony is completely invisible on the internet, because fake cluelessness is indistinguishable from the surrounding real cluelessness."
Could you explain that to me like I'm five?
If it's helpful, the 8th deadly sin is failure to recognize sarcasm.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Only if you have adequate storage to overcome any temporary lack of generation.
I'm on the left and I'm actually pro-coal. I'd love to see Ohio and PA voters working in coal mines well into the next century since it's so important to them.
I live in BC. Almost all our power is hydroelectric, and it can deal with peak periods. You're talking bullshit, both on quantities required, and ability to deal with peak usage. I'm going to be charitable and assume you're just a fucking moron, and not a sociopath.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
No.
Storage has nothing to do with "base load" ... perhaps you want to read what base load actually is.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Only if you have adequate storage to overcome any temporary lack of generation.
Not that big a problem with wind actually. We can store for that long. The bigger problem is hydros. Given a bad season rain or mild winter, the dams can have an entire year with under projected energy. That is when Sweden. normally a net exporter, needs to import massive amounts of energy because they don't have coal plants anymore.
A traditional base load constantly meets the minimum demand of the grid. If you have a relatively windless night, you can't generate enough power to provide that base. Assuming you have enough generation to meet demand in general, the problem is storing that power to allow constant output.
When I know that 5% of my demand is always fulfilled by renewables I can reduce my base load capacity by 5%.
No storage needed.
When do I know that? When I have records of significant long time about my power production with renewables.
So: there is no problem with storage.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
In order to get 5% always fulfilled without storage you would need massively more than that in production. To completely convert your base load to wind and solar you either need to be able to store some of the energy or you need to have enough generators that even in the worst conditions you're still generating enough power to meet minimum demand. The latter would require you to have far more capacity than would be used on anything like a regular basis.
Sigh ... ... as in Germany, or many other countries of Europe, already have that!!!
In order to get 5% always fulfilled without storage you would need massively more than that in production
Of course!!!!
But we
To completely convert your base load to wind and solar you either need to be able to store some of the energy or you need to have enough generators that even in the worst conditions
Wrong again!!
A load following plant or peak plant or balancing plant is completely capable of producing "base load". Facepalm. Base load is just current, electric power, just like any other plant.
Modern grids wont have any base load plants any more as they are neither needed nor economical.
The latter would require you to have far more capacity than would be used on anything like a regular basis.
No it would not. Why do you think that? Germany already has production capacity of 140% - 150% of its need. Base load is 40% in Germany, 60% in France. We simply could switch off all base load plants and still have enough power. But: then we could not sell power to the rest of Europe.
"Base load" has absolutely nothing to do with renewable power or storage. Base load is not a magical goal you need to reach. It is only a technical term for power plants that used to run close to max output 24/365 ... and with so much renewables we have right now, we need to shut them down. And so we do. We do not need any fossile or nuclear plants anymore that run 24/365, hence their "base load" is replaced by renewables. Pretty simple if you think about it.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
A load following plant or peak plant or balancing plant is completely capable of producing "base load". Facepalm. Base load is just current, electric power, just like any other plant.
Modern grids wont have any base load plants any more as they are neither needed nor economical.
In other words, it's this power plant that is allowing you to get away from a traditional base load, not the wind and solar. The wind and solar are just the reason you want to get away from it.
We get away from base load plants because daily production of power is already approaching the percentil of what traditionally was base load.
Baseload in Germany is 40%, renewable contribution to the grid is since a few years on a similar level.
Peak even was around 75% ... 75% of the energy needed at that day was produced by wind and solar and other renewable means.
So we are removing nuclear and brown coal base load plants as well as stone coal/hard coal load following plants.
But I'm not sure if I understand your comment correctly, did you want to say something else?
Point is, with increasing renewable capacity that basically "feeds into the grid regardless of demand" we can remove base load plants that traditionally were used to "feed into the grid regardless of demand" ... just saying.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.