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Consumers In Germany Were Paid To Use Electricity This Holiday Season (inhabitat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inhabitat: The cost of electricity in Germany has decreased so dramatically in the past few days that major consumers have actually been paid to use power from the grid. While "negative pricing" is not an everyday occurrence in the country, it does occur from time to time, as it did this holiday weekend. This gift to energy consumers is the result of hundreds of billions of dollars invested in renewable energy over the past two decades. This most recent period of negative pricing was a result from warm weather, strong breezes, and the low demand typical of people gathering together to celebrate. Germany's temporary energy surpluses are a result of both low demand and variably high supply. Wind power typically makes up 12 percent of Germany's power consumption on a daily basis. However, on windy days, that percentage can easily multiply several times the average. The older segment of Germany's energy portfolio, such as coal plants, are not able to lower output quickly enough. Thus, there is a glut of electricity. On Sunday, Christmas Eve, major energy consumers, such as factory owners, were being paid more than 50 euros (~$60) per megawatt-hour consumed. Further reading: The New York Times
The title is misleading and typical greenwash propaganda.
Germany has one of the highest energy price on the world and even in times when the wind blows consumers pay a premium. Prices here only have one direction - upwards and the sky is the limit.
We want and need cheap and dependable power, not expensive and erratic power.
Exactly. Conversely, France needs Germany to keep the lights on when their nukes cannot reliably provide (too hot, too cold, too much load - their availability is on average less than 80% and their installed capacity is just 2/3 of the peak demand). One hand washes the other.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
While nukes need high enough levels of water in the cooling water river they use, which isn't' the case sometimes in summer so they have to shut down,
This is a very rare occasion. For example, during summer heat waves in the US Northeast, it is nuclear plants that keep the lights one while almost no wind is producing. One plant out of many reducing output is very different than the entire wind output of Germany falling because of low wind conditions.
A fungus finally figured out how to digest lignin, in a process described by biochemists as "untying a knot with a flamethrower". The same process is still used by fungi today, pretty much unaltered.
To add to this description, the way the knot is "tied" is that wood is a cellulose-in-lignin composite, in which the lignin is a combinatorial polymer -- the plant uses several different monomers that are sort-of randomly put together, giving you a very large number of possible products, making it impossible for any reasonably-sized set of enzymes to tackle. As Shanghai Bill described it, the eventual fungal solution was to start by pumping a blast of free radicals into the lignin, breaking it up into fragments that were more amendable to further processing.
This also points to a fundamental problem with the development of cellulosic ethanol -- we haven't managed to speed up the fermentation process much, because wood and other plant structural materials are the end result of a eons-long evolutionary stalemate between plants and microbes. There simply aren't any easy molecular biology shortcuts for digesting it; all approaches appear to have been well-balanced between biological costs incurred by the defender and the attacker.
Of course, maybe we can get around the problem by circumventing the rules of the game. For instance, bulk physical treatment process can pre-degrade plant material (physical conditions aren't accessible to microbes because of scale or biological compatibility, but engineers will still need to make the cost and energy consumption of the process economically worthwhile). Or, genetically engineering plants to produce easily degraded lignins (but this means your biomass crops have unilaterally disarmed one of their defense mechanisms).