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.

Comments

Clearly

[MightyMartian]

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?

Re:Clearly

[cayenne8]

Either way, I"m thinking "Cool!! That leaves more oil and gas for us here in the US and we can take a bit more time to switch over and take advantages of best methods and standards established by the countries that jump on the bandwagon first".

I think the US should let other nations do the R&D on this one....and let someone else shake out the bug before we jump in."

It would be nice for a change....

Re:Clearly

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re: Clearly

[thesupraman]

Um. No.
While I know your knee is busy jerking.. You have got your over zealous reaction wrong.
You are supposed to be complaining about the way this is saving us from the devising destruction that nuclear power will spill all over our children real soon now.. not the evil oil companies.
This is Europe replacing nuclear power, not (on the whole) oil.

It is also, as is often the case, highly biased reporting. They use the inflated capacity of assuming these sources can all product at peak capacity 24/7/365. Which of course is not true for the majority of them. Once you allow for their actual protection you see it falls back under 20â..... but then that's not a story, is it.
The SD state of affairs is that the greens in Europe are managing to get one form of clean energy (nuclear) replaced with another (solar and wind) that actually kills many more people, while actually increasing demand for hydrocarbon based power to fill in the gaps in base load.

Congratulations.

Of course now the other knee will jerk with a whole lot of 60s era paranoia about how radiation is evil and will destroy us all, while ignoring the fact that the existing problems with nuclear power have almost all been produced by the green movement by stalling development of newer safer and more efficient designs and making the cost of regulatory oversight so high that old plants have to be kept running way past their design lifespans.

I guess that's with another congratulations right there.

But no.. Pat each other on the back for having increased demand for hydrocarbon based power generation.. good job!

Re:Clearly

[MightyMartian]

What a load of crap!

http://www.snopes.com/2017/02/...

No, there's no fakery here. And when you're finished digesting just how gullible, then you can ponder the fact that the Arctic has been as high as 30 degress above normal temperatures this winter. While you try to salve your infantile feelings that the universe should behave like you want it to, CO2 still has the properties it has been known to have for over a century;

Grow up

Re: Clearly

[AmiMoJo]

Nuclear in Europe is insanely expensive. As in, you would be insane to pay those prices for it. Even with massive over-build and backup storage, wind is far cheaper. There is just no economic case for nuclear any more, at least not here.

Rant all you like about environmental nutjobs and NIMBYs, but it's investors and governments who are killing off nuclear. That and the returns on renewables are far better than could ever be hoped for from developing new nuclear designs to replace they crappy ones we have now.

By the way, did you know that Germany built -5 new coal power stations. Minus 5, as in they built some new ones but closed even more, ending up with 5 fewer and the new ones are cleaner to boot. Even China hit peak coal a couple of years back and is now on the decline.

Re: Clearly

[david_bonn]

I am often struck by the way that the current debate about intermittent renewable power is strikingly similar to the arguments between net heads and bell heads two decades previously. The funny part from a historical standpoint is that both were kind of right.

You also miss an important point. The other factor that is important in power generation is if it is dispatchable. By dispatchable I mean can she adjust the power generated quickly to meet demand. Current nuclear and coal plants require long startup times and current nuclear plants can't throttle their power output very well, which makes them much less valuable in a world with a lot of renewables. Combined-cycle natural gas, on the other hand, is easy and quick to start up so it is very dispatchable.

There are a few other factors that somewhat mitigate the intermittent nature of solar and wind. The first one, kind of obvious, is that you know more or less in the near future how much power you will be able to produce from these sources (we know when the sun rises and sets, and weather forecasts 24 hours out are fairly accurate -- especially if you just want to know if it will be sunny or windy). The other is that if we have a larger geographical distribution for solar and wind, the intermittency problem is somewhat mitigated -- it is unlikely to be cloudy and windless everywhere at the same time. Finally, there are other ways to store energy than batteries. If you have an old-style hot water heater rather than an on-demand system, you are essentially storing energy in the hot water tank -- and it would be plausible to have a system that would heat your hot water when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. You can do similar things with heating and air conditioning systems in buildings, and even to a lesser extent in refrigerators or freezers.

You will still need some storage, but probably not as much as you think.

I would say 25.4% is greater than 2%

[jopsen]

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.

Re:Base load

[bobbied]

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....

Re:Worked with digital TV

[Joce640k]

Nuclear is 500% more expensive to decommission than was projected. And after that there are millions in costs to protect the decaying nuclear waste lest it be taken by terrorists.

If only there were some new types of reactors designed after 1950....

Renewable-schmenewable...

[denzacar]

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?