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Germany Sets New National Record With 85 Percent of Its Electricity Sourced From Renewables (digitaltrends.com)
Germany was able to set a new national record for the last weekend of April with 85 percent of all electricity consumed in the country being produced from renewables -- wind, solar, biomass, and hydroelectric power. Digital Trends reports: Aided by a seasonal combination of windy but sunny weather, during that weekend the majority of Germany's coal-fired power stations weren't even operating, while nuclear power stations (which the country plans to phase out by the year 2022) were massively reduced in output. To be clear, this is impressive even by Germany's progressive standards. By comparison, in March just over 40 percent of all electricity consumed in the country came from renewable sources. However, while the end-of-April weekend was an aberration, the hope is that it won't be for too much longer. According to Patrick Graichen of the country's sustainability-focused Agora Energiewende Initiative, German renewable energy percentages in the mid-80s should be "completely normal" by the year 2030.
10 or maybe even more years ago, Germany government was funding renewable energy production to get it to a mass production level, since a couple of years they are funding energy storage.
Anyone want to complain how it's not working ?
New things are always on the horizon
Use radioactive wasteland as fuel.
10 or probably even more years ago the German government started funding renewable energy production to get it to mass production level, these days they are funding energy storage.
Anyone want to discuss how their plans are not working ?
New things are always on the horizon
Germany is so sustainable, that they may turn you into fertilizer when you freeze to death with some of the most expensive electric bills in the industrialized world (about 35 cents/kWh, Denmark costs even more).
The 200-foot high Matilija Dam (left, photo courtesy of Matilija Coalition), has completely filled in with sediment in only thirty years. It has been decommissioned and the process of removing the dam and restoring the river has begun.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Can we have some figures for how much filthy bloody lignite they burned over the last two quarters as well,they must be available..
More fool the Germans! Who will be laughing in 5 years when all their wind, and sunlight run out! Idiots!
Indeed. Germany exports its trash and imports the electricity from burners up north. I guess the Left counts massive loads of trash as "renewable" biomass.
Now, one place that's truly interesting is China. They are investing very heavily in "green" power since for them it's an immediate necessity.
They are not. Are they suggesting that we can make a new sun? It is misleading to call is something it is not.
idiot
Sadly all this is despite the German governments best efforts. For a few years recently they really tried to limit the growth of renewables. At least when it comes to small and medium network-connected installations. For small installations the credits got rather abruptly reduced. Slightly bigger Installations (>10kw) now have to pay VAT on the power they generate and use themselves. The overall amount of installed renewables got Hard-limited (I assume new installations wont get approved once its reached).
The way the credit system for the renewables works also causes really high electricity costs for private households and small businesses. Basially the cheaper electrical power on the spot market gets the more expensive the electricity gets. This is made worse by market effects cause baseline power plants to run for power export purposes. Running the plants causes the price of power on the national spot market to go actually negative but the power is then actually sold at a profit to neighboring countries.
What makes the prices even higher is the fact that big users of electricity get an exception from paying into the renewable credit scheme. In fact the more power you use the easier this is to get.
The increasing cost is used by the Government to sell the reduction in credits and the limiting of renewable installations to the voters.
Anway wikipedia has the bare facts if you want to read it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I really think that germany now needs a energy storage promotion law but it seems like the current government won't really do anything in that direction. Instead there is talk of really stupid "smart" grid schemes backed by smart meters.
It was a fairly warm sunny weekend, power demand would have been near optimal lows. That is like winning a race no one else enters.
The only way Germany satisfies the massive weekday base load for Industry without its own nuke plants is by buying power from France's nuke plants.
"To be clear, this is impressive even by Germany's progressive standards."
No it isn't. It just shows their ongoing idiocy re: nuclear power. They could've reduced carbon (and other) emissions to zero by now if they'd increased nuclear output.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
... and this proves it too.
Fission is not cost effective and only works with massive amounts of taxpayers money. And the only real effect it has is putting power in to the hands of few to the disadvantage of many.
The world as such should decommision Fission ASAP, just like Germany is doing. The next Tchernobyl/Fukushima Fuckup is bound to happen, so we might aswell slim down our chances of that happening ASAP.
My 2 eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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Half my electricity is for loading my EV (Nissan Leaf) at night. No sun, almost no wind :-(
And in the balance of trade, the Euros are in Germany's favour, since they produce more at peak time and therefore peak price, and buy at low demand, hence low prices.
Germany used X GWh that month. They produced 0.85X GWh from renewables.
What difference does it make, in a free market, where they sold the GWhs?
You are clearly a little clueless so either presents some evidence or put your tin-foil hat back on and hide in your bunker. Man made climate change is completely indisputable by anyone except the most deluded oil profiters. Even big oil companies are beginning to accept it and have contingency plans and are investing in renewables. It was never re-named and I'd love to know where you heard that piece of utter nonsense!
I've set a new record: The most posts made on Slashdot. By me. Today. On this article. Yey me!
And they will pay twice that for Hinckley C nuclear.
How much is fracking costs getting added to in the USA, by the way?
So in the weekend on the perfect day when solar and wind are at max we are covering 85% of residential consumption.
In the European Union household electric energy consumption is about 30% rest being the industry and services. Considering Germany industrial sector it will be safe to say the domestic energy consumption will be around 20% of total electric energy consumption.
So in a perfect weekend Germany was able to provide less than one fifth of electricity consumption during the week.
To cover the industry renewable capacity will need to increase at least five times to work in perfect conditions. Considering the fact the best spots for solar and wind have been already used (unless they were stupid to chose the worst locations in the first place) we are going to start the law of diminished returns.
Just adding that EU goal of being totally green and use only renewable resources is made partially by relocating production to China with their record of being "clean" I see a long way to go to reduce CO2.
Germany used X GWh that month. They produced 0.85X GWh from renewables.
No they didn't. They touched 85% for an instant when the wind kicked up on a Sunday morning before people got up and increased consumption.
It wasn't 85% for the month as you imply, and it wasn't even 85% for the weekend as the headline implies.
One small point about this giddy enthusiasm for 'renewables' is that it is a process of re-coupling the economy to the weather. Yep.. that stuff. Solar panels need sunlight to produce power. The wind needs to blow, but not too much and at the right times for the big pinwheels to generate power. The placement of these installations is driven by local climate. Problem is, these artifacts to fight climate change are also a bet that it won't change. So extensive periods of cloud or changes in the pattern of winds may not be helpful to the process. So maybe the rush to deploy this stuff could have been slower while we see how it affects things -- and put some effort into helping folks being harmed by climate change right now. To say nothing of what to do about the places sinking under the rising sea?
The only energy source we seem to have an infinite supply of is the hot air and wind from the politicians supported by the people making a quick buck from our anxieties. Would that something useful could be done with that?
"But science." That's my detailed argument in favor of nuclear power.
No cheating now you Germans: VMW, Bosch .... its goes on .. be honest
They are counting Biomass (basically anthracite coal) as 'renewable'.
> Instead they are installing solar panels in the world's second cloudiest location (the Bering Sea is first). Forget the clouds and just look at the geographic latitude. Germany is closer to the arctic circle than to the nearest tropic.
Germany land area: 348,900.0 sq. miles United States land area: 9,147,420.0 sq. miles Over 26 times the land area. In other words, it's easier to get the power from the source to the people in Germany, than it would be in the USA. It's the same argument, people complain about, when talking about internet speed. "Japan & South Korea" have x times the speed and x cheaper price of internet, than in the USA. Japan land area: 364,560.0 sq miles South Korea land area: 97,480.0 It's easier in smaller countries to build out, than the USA. Ok, so the liberal logic would say, move all the people to large urban population centers, and make living out in the middle of the nation illegal. Yeah, that would be the way their liberal minds would work. After all, it's "for your own good". You want renewable power, fine, but leave coal, gas & nuclear alone.
For one place it might be the abundance of solar. For others the abundance of mountains. Others their tidal shores, or wind.
The USA being vast gives them absolutely the ability to connect the entire continent and use wind solely and alone, since there will never be a USA that suffers enough loss of all wind resource as to fail to supply demand that is in any way sourced as appropriately supplied as any sane grid would do.
Insane grid paucity is how California got bilked. And that was with fossil fuels. Nothing stops the power company fucking things up deliberately to generate better profits in the USA because any such regulation would never get past the propaganda against it.
Of all the things to worry about, this is the least worrisome. Birds that learn to avoid the deadly white spinning things will survive. The rest will die. In the future, all birds will know to avoid the deadly white spinning things.
Oh and power lines do the exact same thing. They've been frying critters since the 1880's.
Turns out Germany uses a shit-ton of carbon based energy sources:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/ho...
Call me when renewables make a dent in their existing carbon based energy sources.
Before anyone accuses me of working for the carbon-based energy folks - I have a Model 3 on order - but I have no illusions as to what will be generating the electricity that I will use to charge it. In my area it's mostly Nuclear and Coal.
I expect more critical thought from Slashdot readers.
Only about 70% of migratory birds are surviving one annual migration at the moment. The mass extinction of birds is currently on the way. Loosing large birds gliding magnificently above a town is the same loss as loosing the trees, bees, rivers, etc.
Limiting power consumption via LED lamps, lighter vehicles, smaller heated (air-conditioned) areas in houses by smarter architecture, etc. could produce more than enough electricity for decades without making this wonderful planet ugly.
When it's sunny and my demand is low, I can source ALL my electricity from a solar panel on the roof. What is their 12 month average, including nights ?
The amount of people who have died from nuclear is far less than from other energy sources. A simple fact that is never brought up.
Hey look, with ToD the peak rates are considerably more, but look at how much less your off-peak rates -- savings!
Whatever your current usage pattern, it ends up costing more than what you are doing now. Only after insane time shifting do you even break even. When it was offered to me, ToD was a scheme to raise my rates.
But that's the point of these schemes -- to raise revenue.
Thanks to the E.U., the rest of Europe slips further into the stone age.
"You can't have what Germany has without the heavy hand of government."
100% true.
So... just bend over and cede your sovereignty for some shiny renewable energy?
Also not to be cheap/mean but you also can't have gass chambers without the beloved " heavy hand of government".
Only about 70% of migratory birds are surviving one annual migration at the moment.
In 2003, wind turbines killed 33,000 birds a year. Glass windows killed 97 million.
The mass extinction of birds is currently on the way.
Due to habitat loss. Wind turbines don't even register on the scale.
Loosing large birds gliding magnificently above a town is the same loss as loosing the trees, bees, rivers, etc.
That's "Losing". To your point: trees are necessary for temperature control and erosion resistance. Bees are necessary to pollinate fruit trees. Rivers power dams and harbors fish. Large birds... they eat small animals, just like foxes, cats, snakes, wolves and bears. They're not necessary.
Limiting power consumption via LED lamps,
CFL's, which people already use, are almost as efficient (8-12% vs. 8-15%). Lighting is only 7% of electric usage anyways.
lighter vehicles,
99.85% of cars don't even use electricity.
smaller heated (air-conditioned) areas in houses
Heating is usually natural gas. But even if you include it, residential heating plus air conditioning only accounts for 6% of all energy use.
...could produce more than enough electricity for decades
Yeah no. Not when the world population is set to reach 8 billion by 2025 (a 14% growth).
I am living in Germany and I can say for a fact that all this green energy is coming for a very very very high price for the end consumer. This is the trick. Buy consumer does not have the options to choose the energy source. A lot of energy distributors are piggy backing on the Volk (working class)
Here is the quote from the scientific source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... "Worldwide, such facilities have been responsible for the deaths of 140,000 to 328,000 birds and 500,000 to 1.6 million bats, raising questions about their effects on population sustainability."
Sure cats and windows kill times more, and this problem is being addressed too. But wind turbines kill large valuable rare birds. This is the issue. Again the quote from the same article of 2016: "Eagles tend to use that habitat around the turbines. It's windy there, so they can save energy and soar,..."
As for the CFL lamps, - they contain toxic mercury. They are not on sale anymore, it is LED lamps nowadays.
It's easy not to need AC when the summer averages 22C (73F). NY summer average is slightly higher, without the open air to allow cooling breezes. Most of the US has much higher temperatures in the summer. Kansas averages 32C (90F) and usually has a high humidity too.
Coal's making a resurgence, so this is just a temporary thing. [/s]
Contrary to popular belief, fission is renewable too. Just wait 2 billion years or so until the Sun explodes and scatters the heavyish byproducts out into the void where they will eventually collect into a dust cloud, light up as a new a star, and get reprocessed back into Uranium. One more explosion to form an earth type planet complete with whales, and there ya go, fresh new fission fuel, go ahead and dig it up.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
and in other news, highly efficient scuba systems provide 85% of the oxygen a diver needs
15% is a big deal when you're crowing about efficiency but when you've always got some other source for that 15% or more whenever you need it, you're still not cutting it.
Especially when your end goal is hoping someone else's supply is available to cover the loss. If they go to a similar "efficiency" then both of you are reliant on someone else to provide the difference. And in a lot of systems there isn't enough "scaling" available to get most to 100% without making sure someone is stuck overgenerating using the old politically incorrect "non renewables".
Phasing out nuclear instead of learning to do it right, and educating people and removing nucleophobe FUD is going to lead to "energy poverty" where certain nations get the juice and others go without. Most likely hiding the failures behind shifting the pollution elsewhere. Fission and eventually fusion is the ONLY end game humanity can survive-unless one of the "rich nations" decides on some very successful eugenics programs and population culling for the rest of the world
Jawohl. Ich bin ein Kohlebergmann. Ich arbeite nicht.
So it's really doing extremely well.
Meanwhile how many TWh are overbuilt in those "conventional" systems? About 30% over-build is generally considered correct.
That would be about 0.3TWh built up and not used. And not accounted for in the cost of conventional.
Dang. Makes building out an extra 0.1TWh of renewable look like bugger all.
PS what was the total for renewables? You don't list how much the various TYPES of conventional, but you DID break down to solar and wind rather than "renewable". Was there a time when non conventional didn't manage 20%? No? The lowest non conventional added up to was 21%? then you're talking bollocks.
Highly unlikely this is true. It is possible that for a split second during national holiday in the middle of low power demand they have touched whatever article claims.
"Eagles tend to use that habitat around the turbines. It's windy there, so they can save energy and soar,..."
That quote of yours does not make any sense.
Wind turbines are either at sea: there is nothing any eagle wants, unless it is a fish eagle, but for that the turbines are usually to far out, or they are placed on farmer fields: nothing lives there that is hunted by eagles.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
When you see a soaring eagle it is flying usually not for hunting but for manifesting itself for different reasons, - finding a mating partner, guarding its space, etc. At least I was told so at a training course by a professional ornithologist.
And an eagle is not the only big protected bird, there are other endangered species.
And none of those big bird is flying anywhere close to a modern windmill, they have no reason for that ...
If you would complain about crows or other birds living in human farmland, you had a point.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...Because they will run out of Jews eventually.
Yeah, right, you believe you, bud. Nobody else does, 'less they really want to blame "renewable energy" for their woes rather than anything that they don't associate with the wrong political party.
More realistic numbers from Wikipedia:
1300 raptors are killed annually, among them 70 golden eagles
Not tiny numbers, but nothing like what you're suggesting.
The small turbines used at Altamont are dangerous to various raptors... As of 2010, a settlement has been reached... Nearly half of the smaller turbines will be replaced by newer, more bird-friendly models.
And the problem doesn't even apply to new turbines we're building now.
And what happens to that 85% of energy that supposedly generated from renewables? You cannot just switch off a coal power plant off and on the way you switch the light off an on. It's a complicated process that takes hours if not days. So if the wind starts blowing, the extra energy the windmills produce is basically useless.
However, while the end-of-April weekend was an aberration, the hope is that it won't be for too much longer. According to Patrick Graichen of the country's sustainability-focused Agora Energiewende Initiative, German renewable energy percentages in the mid-80s should be "completely normal" by the year 2030.
This weekend is at the intersection "not hot enough to run air conditioning" and "not cold enough to run heat" (both of which are largely electric in Germany, I believe), and being on the weekend countless offices and businesses were closed, driving demand way down.
This interesting report will be the year-long daily percentage of Germany's power needs that are supplied by local (generated within Germany's borders, not imported). Once renewables are able to provide, consistently, every day for 12 months, a minimum of 50% of Germany's power needs, this is nothing more than a mildly interesting milestone.
In 13 years it is hoped this self-described 'aberration' will become the norm, which makes this story premature, and as I often say, "Premature is rarely a good thing!"
Ken
Godwin, is that you?
Funny. I see comments on 'now say why it won't work.' As if this were comprehensive proof. I hate to tell you...that was 85% on -one- day. One. It proves nothing...if there had been no nuclear plants or coal, then 15% that day would have power, and then that night there would have been far more without, as well as the next day.
The actual word "nazi" didn't appear so the ruling is that the thread can continue.
One good day, one good week or even one good month doesn't count. What matters is the average of a whole year.
And instead of considering what % of electricity came from renewables, what should be considered is how much CO2/MWh emissions and total CO2 emissions are evolving.
I suspect those numbers aren't quite as rosy. Too much renewables retires baseload and increases demand for peaking plants which pollute twice as much per MWh produced.
As usual, the truth is hidden !
This is an inspiration! Meanwhile, in other news: "A news report says Japan's tsunami-ravaged nuclear plant was so unprepared for the disaster that workers had to bring protective gear and instruction manuals from elsewhere and borrow equipment from a contractor. The report, released by operator Tokyo Electric Company, is based on interviews of workers and plant data. It portrays chaos in a desperate and ultimately unsuccessful battle to protect the Fukushima plant from meltdown, and shows that workers struggled with unfamiliar equipment." "Scientists have found traces of radioactivity in fish off the California coast that migrated from the waters off of Japan, site of the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster of 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The researchers say the evidence is unequivocal. The young tuna were found to be contaminated with two radioactive forms of the element cesium from Fukushima." http://content.usatoday.com/co... "Japanese whalers caught 2 animals along the northern coast that had traces of radiation from leaks at a damaged nuclear power plant, officials said. 2 of 17 minke whales caught off the Pacific coast of Hokkaido showed traces of radioactive cesium, both about 1/20th of the legal limit, fisheries officials said. They are the first whales thought to have been affected by radiation leaked from the Fukushima nuclear plant since it was hit by a 3/11/11 earthquake and tsunami."