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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.
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 can't tell whether this calls for a "whoosh" comment or if it's double irony...
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
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.
Both of your statements are incorrect.
Because all renewable power generation goes offline at the same time,
Different forms of renewable power generation go offline at different times, and geographically separated sources don't go offline in synch. One thing you can count on is that solar power generation stops at night, but this is a known time dependence, and hence can be accounted for in scheduling; not an intermittancy, which is the hardest interruption to handle.
Actually, peak load and solar don't happen to match up well, peak load is usually in the late afternoon (summer AC). Wind is not much better and a whole lot less reliable. Both are extremely hard to schedule with sufficient margin to keep a stable power grid. This means you have to overbuild by a lot of capacity (more than double) to provide the reliable energy source necessary to keep the electric grid up.... OR you have to keep a pile of fossil fueled capacity around to pick up the slack when the renewables are not able to provide what is needed.
and there's no way to store electricity.
It's also not true that there's no way to store electricity. You should know better than that, you've never heard of batteries? What you probably mean to say is that electrical storage is too expensive to be economically viable. That statement, however, is disputable. Definitely in places where hydropower is stored in reservoirs this is untrue, and new battery, fuel cell, compressed-air, and even flywheel technologies are coming online with decreases in price.
Again, you are sort of right, but practically wrong. Energy storage is indeed expensive if for no other reason than conversion losses. A really good chemical battery is going to chew up about 30% of the input AC power when you do all the conversions and account for all the losses (AC -> DC, DC into chemicals to charge the battery.. Chemicals -> DC, DC to AC to discharge it). The equipment just doesn't scale well either and over the total cost of such systems + the loss make them *really* expensive.
Then there is the question of "how big" you need to make the storage capacity. I dare say that it's got to be a LOT bigger than you think it should be t account for the worst case. This is driven by or dependence on the electric grid and it's reliability. We simply cannot easily absorb outages and not realize that they will come with significant financial costs and even loss of life. We have nearly zero tolerance for blackouts, which drives the needed capacity in any storage system higher and higher. Oh, and don't forget the extra capacity on the generation side to recharge your storage PLUS keep the grid online...
The primary point I'm making here is that storage is NOT a viable option. Renewables as they exist today, do not have enough reliability to be anything more than alternatives and we will need to keep backup fossil fueled alternative sources ready for when the wind stops and it's raining for days longer than the batteries can cover....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
If you're charging batteries using AC, you're doing it wrong (except in extended bad weather). There's been this push to make PV panels convert to AC immediately using a micro-inverter on each panel, then feed that AC to the grid - which is fine if you're grid-connected. OTOH my batteries are mostly fed by old-school DC. Being lead-acid, they need about 10% more put in than they can supply, they feed the DC lighting and refrigeration circuits directly, an the AC inverter runs at about 89-94% efficiency depending on load. I've been living this way for >20 years, and it IS a viable option. YMMV, but just because it's not viable *for some situations* doesn't mean it's off the table.
Why do so many people make binary statements? Renewable energy sources are *part* of the solution, they're not *all* of the solution, and they're not *none* of the solution.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
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.
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
Batteries are NOT 99% efficient, no way, no how... Not even close... The best chemistry you can get is about 90%, meaning for every 100 Watt Hours you put in, you get 90 out (best case). That's JUST the battery. Modern Switching power supplies can approach 95% in the AC-DC conversion, but DC to AC is a lot less efficient, PLUS the losses though the system are cumulative... You lose 5% here, 10% there and 20% there and it's looking pretty bad for efficiency, not quite 35% of total loss, but not that far away... (100 (AC-DC @ 95%) 95 (Charge discharge @ 90%) 85.5 (DC -> AC @ 80%) = 68.4 out (31.6% loss)
Pumped storage is two things.. You pump water up hill to store energy, then let it flow downhill to reclaim that energy. 90% is not possible without violating some basic rules of thermodynamics or physics.. (you pick). Just the IR losses alone in the pumps and generators are going to eat your lunch and we haven't even considered the losses that all this moving water has as it flows though pipes..
However, you do correctly point out that pumped storage is actually the most efficient way we have of storing electrical power. The PROBLEM with this storage method is finding places where you can actually build the necessary impound (say the top of a mountain) and the environmental disruption it causes when you build this elevated water storage pool and finding a location where enough water exists or can be collected to pump up hill. This is an environmental nightmare for multiple reasons..
Finally, the demand curve doesn't stop when the sun doesn't shine, but solar collection DOES. Same with wind only with more variation in forecasted supply verses actual. Both are inconsistent and don't match demand in any meaningful way, so you either need LOTS of storage or some kind of alternate supply or a mixture of both. But that's my real point. Renewables are fine, but they are NOT a replacement for fossil fuels. Nuclear isn't either. Hopefully fusion will eventually be figured out and end the problem, but nobody knows if or when that will ever be. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, fossil fuels are all we have that actually does the job reliably enough. We can supplement fossil fuels with renewables, but we cannot replace them.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
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.
You did not ask a question regarding power grids.
And thank you, you don't need to tell me how grids work, I worked in that business about 10 years.
one hour to the next and are REALLY hard to schedule.
They are not. They can not be "dispatched", that is waht you mean probably. The scheduling is easy. In "the grid world" I worked in (might be different from your grids as square root of 2 and 3 seems important to you) we use weather reports, or more precisely: "prognosis" systems for wind and solar plants. Accuracy is around +/-5% on a 6 hour forecast and going close to +/-1% for an one hour forecast. Plenty of time to buy or sell power on the spot market or "reschedule" balancing power plants.
Storage doesn't solve the problem because it's too inefficient ... your other claims regarding it are wrong.
As I pointed out: storage is efficient to roughly 90%
A simple coal plant has an efficiency of 42%, same as a nuclear plant.
A high tech gas plant is approaching 60% by combining a gas turbine with a traditional steam boiler/turbine.
So: storage is far far far more efficient than a power plant.
There is a reason Germany has so much pumped storage, long before the "green revolution". It simply makes more sense to store the surplus power of a load following plant for half an hour than ramping it down and ramping it up again in 30 minutes.
but they simply CANNOT replace the capacity we now have
In your country? No idea.
In my country and rest of Europe we are working to do exactly that. You can rotate in your grave as much as you want about this.
Personally, the ONLY technology that seems like it could, maybe, fix this problem is fusion power. ... but the "power funding industrial complex" likes to waste money on ITER concepts :D
Why? It would just be another insane expensive power source like coal/oil/uranium already is. When Solar and Wind will provide power for nearly free in the foreseeable future.
The way how we approach fusion right now, will never work. We need to switch from magnetic confinement to electric fields
Even if ITER would work, we would need to switch soon to an neutron free fusion process as a ITER reactor would not survive its own neutron production for more than a few months, a year at best.
Considering how much the ITER and other fusion reactors cost and how long it takes to build a "working" (cough cough) reactor there will never be a grid powered by fusion reactors. Germany e.g. can not build 100 fusion reactors per year and decommission them a year after when they are destroyed by their own neutron flux.
However if you want to share your irrational numbers anecdotes, I'm all ear. You never stop learning, at least that is my slogan ;D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.