The price of a stabilized green power grid is very steep, one could say it is like a “hockey stick”
Story submitted by Eric Worrall (h/t John Droz)
Coal and gas electricity companies are being paid up to 400x times the wholesale price of power, in return for helping to stabilize the German electricity grid.
According to Bloomberg, “Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that the government is paying more utilities than ever to help stabilize the country’s electricity grid.”
“At the beginning, this market counted for only a small portion of our earnings,” said Hartmuth Fenn, the head of intraday, market access and dispatch at Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest utility. “Today, we earn 10 percent of our plant profits in the balancing market”.
Given that lignite coal plants are also playing this game, according to Bloomberg, and lignite plants are famously inflexible, you have to wonder exactly how fossil fuel plants are providing the required flexibility.
One interesting possibility is that the CO2 belching fossil fuel utility companies are spinning their generators up to full power, and are simply discarding vast amounts of excess energy, until solar or wind output drops – so they can be ready to dump extra capacity onto the grid at a moment’s notice.
At 400x wholesale rate, they could afford to burn away gigawatts of power as waste heat, and still make a handsome profit from the “balancing” fee for whatever energy they actually supply to the grid.
The graph above is from this article at No Tricks Zone, which is reporting on the effects on consumers in Germany.
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It is hard to believe Germans can be so impractical.
I am sure that is exactly what they are doing, spinning their turbines and dumping the energy. In order to be ble to deliver the enrgy required, this may be the only way. And the economics will support and drive the practice. Its a no-brainer.
The secret might be in how coal plant emissions are calculated, on the basis of delivered power or coal consumed. If the former then there is a good chance these power plants are burning at full power but not delivering it all to the grid, thus allowing the illusion of a green energy mix.
…and there’s been a run on generators
A very telling note in the Bloomberg article:
I’d like to see a coal plant be that responsive. Maybe if involved coal gasification and a feed in to a gaseous fuel turbine….
I was wondering when WUWT was going to highlight the farce that’s going on in Germany as the result of the wind and solar mandates.
You’re looking at a preview of coming attractions in the U.K. and in California.
Meanwhile, German consumers are paying 40% more for their electricity than the EU average.
Thank you for reminding me … 🙂
Ric said, quote “I’d like to see a coal plant be that responsive. Maybe if involved coal gasification and a feed in to a gaseous fuel turbine….”
They discovered that producing heat or electricity is not much different. So they run flat out 24/7 delivering one or the other.
It means all the market players, in the backup business can be wiped out at leisure. The big 24/7 mass generator wins every time. Plus all the co2/fossil fuel figures mean exactly nothing. Its all fake.
LOL
The analogy between the ‘power grid’ and other situations where discrete quantities interact with each other is obvious to me as a physical chemist.
I recently watched a program on “optimization of the airline boarding process” in which they compared a fully micromanaged process in which passengers were pre-segregated into 16 groups (based on their assigned seating) and boarded under strict protocols with a process based on open seating and passengers boarding ad libidum – “like ants” was the description used in the program.
The UNcontrolled boarding process, relying on individuals making personal decisions in the interest of their own convenience, was neary 25% FASTER than the micromanaged process. There is a MUCH broader lesson for would-be micromanagers of any process applying to a statistically significant number of similar ‘entities’ – a priori controls typically degrade system performance in comparison to a system allowed to regulated itself internally using local conditions and options.
One of the grestest scientific breakthroughs of chemistry in the 19th century was the development of “statistical mechanics” – a branch of physics that treated fluids as large ensembles of independent entities (molecules) rather than as a single, manageable object (a bulk of fluid).
In the words of Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.”
Wind power is not new. It is one of the oldest forms of energy generation and it was abandoned on purpose.
Good for green, growing plants though … more CO2 fertilizer …
But the wind is free…al said so
My dad always said the Germans were the smartest. Global warming is pseudoscience. Maybe they are running out of beer and started taking stupid pills.
Once again, green power actually results in an increase in CO2 production.
The new lignite plants are all base load. Utility load balancing (peak load, and renewable fluctuation) in Germany comes from four main sources. Peak load gas turbines (the newest can ramp at an incredible rate of 40-50 MW per minute, with over 600 MW max output). Spinning reserves, usually older smaller coal stations running something like 35% output, that with increased firing can ramp over half an hour to an hour to full output. Imports from grid interconnect. France exports nuclear electricity to both Germany and the UK to help those nations cope with their renewable foolishness. Finally there is some industrial load shedding such as is being proposed for the UK and is done on weak grid interconnects in the US.
In the US, gas peaker electricity is about 2x coal or gas CCGT base load, according to the EIA 2013 generating cost report. Germany is probably not that different in a relative sense.
Historically peaking power, necessary to balance the unreliable solar and wind sources, has been more expensive than less flexible base load sources. If the magnitude of unreliable “green” power is too high for available peaking plants to balance, more wasteful methods, such as described, may be resorted to.
Make no mistake, conventional utilities are being FORCED to subsidize “green” energy by balancing these unreliable sources.
Rud, thats sensible economic operation. Here a lignite plant is run at near 100% but only producing heat. When power is required its just literally switched to electric mode and money rolls in. Four hours a day of paying generation will more than cover 24 hours fuel burn.
Germans are stupid all over. They toss aside nuclear power as “too dangerous.” Apparently the Germans never bother themselves with statistics (or reality) : those “safe” coal power plants have been, in actuality, responsible for 40 times more fatalities, not counting emission related deaths,per gigawatthour of power produced. Wind power has been 20 times more deadly than nuclear (not counting the bird/bat killings). Natural gas 10 times more deadly. Hydro 100 times more deadly and LP gas a whopping 450 times more deadly tha nuclear. The article gave some details – a lignite power plant spent a ton of money to provide itself with the ability to pour 30 megawatts onto the grid within one minute. Obviously they store the energy , probably in the form of heat, and then when power is needed , inject water into contact with the stored heat and produce steam to drive the turbines. Normally one would use an Open Cycle Gas Generator (OCGG) to get power quickly. They use more fuel (twice as much) than a closed cycle gas generator (which heats water to make steam) but operate more or less like a jet engine. Why the Germans don’t use natural gas for this may be due to their dependency upon Russia as supplier.
There are now some large nuclear plant designs that allow for a certain amount of load following (5% more/less power per minute or so) but some small modular reactors can ramp their power up/down very quickly and actually function as peak power generators – for smallish communities they are the only power generator required. I don’t remember the capacity of that particular design, but it certainly would be well in excess of 30 megawatts. Anything under 350 MW is generally considered a small modular reactor.
I believe 400x is not the top. As more and more alternative power sources come on line prices will continue to rise for the consumer.
Power bills for consumers in the CONUS are getting close to a surging point is my feeling. As more alternatives come on line electric prices will continue to rise and rise and rise for those with no solar or alternative power source on their home/business. One would think otherwise but the power companies that manage the grids( very expensive to maintain aging grids) are going to have to start really jacking up rates if they want to stay in business in time.
I will make a prediction now, within about 10 tp 20 years you are going to see most large electric companies going bankrupt.
Is this supposed to say 400x or 400%?
Meanwhile in England we have just demolished the cooling towers of Didcot coal-fired power station as it is sacrificed to appease the great green goddess. To make up the expected shortfall in power entrepreneurs from around the globe are flocking here to buy up English fields and fill them with hundreds of diesel generators which the government gives subsidies for, plus a very decent unit rate when they are are called on as back up because the white elephants, sorry I mean windmills aren’t turning.
You couldn’t make it up. No, people would think you were mad if you proposed such a crazed scenario. Or they might think you a witless/crooked/incompetent politician.
I forgot to add, my prediction will only happen if power companies don’t make a New Monthly Grid Access Fee.
If you have solar or alternative power source on your home or business and do not purchase much energy from the grid or feed energy in the grid. A monthly Grid Fee would be added if the owners of the property would want to still be connected to the grid.
Oops, Did not know they have already started charging a monthly Grid Access Fee, December 2013 Bloomberg article.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-24/utilities-mimic-cable-with-monthly-fee-to-preserve-grid.html
Couldn’t happen to a nicer people. Just because the Germans are good engineers doesn’t mean that they are also deep thinkers.
The hilarity of Germany’s economic suicide march is captured in two Facts.
1. Germany’s electricity generated carbon footprint in 2013 was up 1.5% over 2012, and authorities now admit due to the increased use of intermittent renewable power, carbon footprint Goals for 2020 and 2030 will be widely missed.
http://www.rtcc.org/2014/03/10/germanys-carbon-targets-in-doubt-as-emissions-rise-in-2013/
2. Electricity for German consumers and businesses now (2014) costs +50% more over 2004 price per KWH.
The price of a stabilized green power grid is very steep, one could say it is like a “hockey stick”. – I like your kind of humour! 😀