From the “twice as expensive, half as reliable” department comes this paper from SPRINGER where they seemed to have figured out (finally) that wind and solar just isn’t all that good for reliable power. Their solution? Overbuild. To me, that’s laughable, because regional weather patterns (such as a rex block high) can easily shut down not just dozens, but thousands of wind systems over a large area. Likewise, a persistent low pressure system (such as a cutoff low) can make clouds and rain over a wide area for an extended period, making solar power next to useless. It doesn’t matter how many wind and solar plants you build, weather will still make it unreliable at times. – Anthony
100 percent renewable energy sources require overcapacity
To switch electricity supply from nuclear to wind and solar power is not so simple
Intermittent sources are, by definition, unsteady. Therefore, a back-up system capable of providing power at a level of 89% of peak load would be needed. This requires creating an oversised power system to produce large amounts of surplus energy. A day storage to handle surplus is ineffective because of the day-night correlation of surplus power in the winter. A seasonal storage system loses its character when transformation losses are considered; indeed, it only contributes to the power supply after periods with excessive surplus production.
The option of an oversized, intermittent renewable-energy-sources system to feed the storage is also ineffective. This is because, in this case, energy can be taken directly from the large intermittent supply, making storage superfluous. In addition, the impact on land use and the transformation of landscape by an unprecedented density of wind convertors and transmission lines needs to be taken into consideration. He also warns of the risk that it will intensify social resistance.
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Reference:
F. Wagner (2017), Surplus from and storage of electricity generated by intermittent sources, Eur. Phys. J. Plus 131: 445, DOI 10.1140/epjp/i2016-16445-3
Well, this is just a projection: current German policy doesn’t call for more than 80% of electricity from renewables, by 2050. They are already at 32% and well on the way thus to their 2020 35% target.
(They closed one nuclear plant last year, plan to close a few GW of coal by 2020 and have built their last ever coal power plants -one of which has never switched on)
and of course there is no need for the wind and solar to actually be in Germany, what with their being a connected grid and shared electricity market across W Europe.
The first cross border Danish/German solar tenders went in this year: the new Danish/German/Swedish shared grid windfarms are going in in the Baltic and new German HVDC lines to Netherlands and Norway are building.
There are new trends such as wind farms with built in pumped hydro and many grid storage schemes too…
Really, difficult though it is technically, Germany will get to 100% renewable and no nukes. Certainly no issue with targets after 2025 when their North/south HVDC finally arrives.
When it comes to “green” predictions Grif is gullible as those folks who watch some televangelist explain how they have unlocked the prophecies of the second coming and sends in money to help that televangelist. Grif simply ignores reality and prefers to cling to the repeatedly disproven predictions big green cynically produces.
Germany is unlikely to ever get even 40% of its energy from renewables. German energy policy is pure politics.
This site https://www.agora-energiewende.de/de/themen/-agothem-/Produkt/produkt/76/Agorameter/ shows the hourly production and consumption of all the sources of electrical energy in Germany.
It also shows how the prices per MWh vary wildly depending on the supply of green electricity.
You can select any timeframe to see the results
Anybody still thinks solar and wind alone can do the job?
Reality is not something the climate true believer really wants to face. California, home of the strongest “green” energy laws lags the nation in carbon reduction. Wind destabilized a large grid in Australia so badly they are going to reduce wind.
“When Plans fail, the Planners Plan” Ronald Reagen
This is the same reasoning the dunces use babbling on about technological innovation with solar and look how much the cost has come down already skeptical folks? When you have solar panels on your roof due to a generous FIT scheme and you can read the output inverter output for yourself, you know exactly what middle class welfare it really is. On top of that you already know your system is only 16-17% efficient at turning the sun’s rays into electricity but don’t worry the men in white lab coats will get us to Green Nirvana.
Bollocks! Even if they can suspend the laws of physics and reach 100% efficiency, all that will do is multiply all those inverter readouts around six times what you get now and six times nothing at night is still nothing dunces. We just get 6 times the variability and even if it cost 1c per kilowatt maximum output, that’s 1c too much at night dummies. What do they teach in arithmetic at primary school nowadays?
Has anyone ever looked at the costs of these green proposals? They are measured in multiples of WORLD GDP!!! That isn’t a joke.
Just How Much Does 1 Degree C Cost?
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/just-how-much-does-1-degree-c-cost/
“Well you are wrong: French policy is to reduce nuclear and increase renewables. They are facing an enormous bill to keep their nuclear plant running -it is all reaching its design limit at the same time.”
Griff seems to be confused between what politicians say they are going to do and what engineers actually do.
The US is the world leader in nuclear power. Everyone else is a distant second. For this reason the Japanese and French bought all the US reactor builders. The 40 year design life of nuke plants is not a design limit. In the US, many plants have been evaluated to operate longer and at higher power since the design limits were very conservative 40 years ago. The US industry is now working on making plants last 80 years.
The French thinking was to replace existing French plants with the 1600 MWe EPR designed for 60 years. I am not sure if this was not a make work project of the socialist government. The French were also going to build 7 US EPRs in partnership with US utilities.
Culturally, the French are lazy and arrogant. The first lesson they learned from the US is how to make existing reactors last longer. They have also found that regulators are much harder on the arrogant than they used to be. Even in France.
I have been told that the first EPR make come online this year in China. I worked on this plant in China before retiring. Meeting the original schedule would have been a huge accomplishment. Now it is a case of limiting the embarrassment for the French.
Germany is already proving it does not work. They have installed too much wind and solar and shut down nuclear plants. As a result they are having to rely heavily on imported power from neighbours at times, which mostly comes from fossil fuels and nuclear. In order to stave off the inevitable Big German Blackout Day, they are now frantically building brown coal power stations and keeping their fingers crossed they get online in time. The result of all this nonsense has been an increase in the average household electricity by 200 Euros pa, and over 600,000 homes disconnected because they can’t pay their bills.
https://www.engadget.com/2016/11/22/tesla-runs-island-on-solar-power/
Sometimes renewable energy can provide more reliable energy.
Sure. For remote islands with no large scale power generation, negligible consumption, reliant on very unreliable and costly shipments of diesel, with a benefactor to provide solar cells and batteries at effectively infinite cost per MW at no charge to the users, and with no mission critical applications such as hospitals exposed to the vagiaries of solar, I heartily recommend renewables.
Although I guess you also have to be indifferent to defoliation and destruction of agricultural land on a mammoth scale (indeed, place no value on your land at all), not care about killing animal life, by indifferent to the heat island, and completely ignore the disposal of incredibly toxic materials after the end of the useful life. And be prepared to allocate massive resources to cleaning and maintenance.
These people are quite literally mentally ill. They are completely incapable of seeing that there’s ANY problem at all with renewables. They don’t cost more. They aren’t unreliable. They aren’t unstable. They don’t require crippling capital cost (and massive grid duplication). They don’t kill birds. They aren’t ugly. They don’t consume a yuuuge amount of steel and concrete, roughly offsetting any abatement potential. They don’t require idling coal base load. They aren’t subsidised. Da Fossil Fuels ARE subsidised. Electric cars won’t be unfeasible when there’s more than 10 due to the extreme shortage of supercharge points. Climate data isn’t fudged to promote Big Wind. It doesn’t export jobs to China. It didn’t cause the Spanish economic collapse.
There’s literally nothing that can be said to these people.
If one utilizes all options, it is possible to get 100% (or 90% or 80%) of power from intermittent renewable energy sources. All options include:
1) Overbuilding. If average production is 30% of nameplate capacity, then build a nameplate renewable capacity that is perhaps 10X peak demand. With this much overbuilding, the periods when output will be less than 10% of nameplate capacity will be relatively short. (In some locations, perhaps as little as 5X nameplate capacity may be practical.)
2) Diversify where possible. Solar helps meet greater demand during the day and where peak demand occurs during summer. If available, hydroelectric can be used when wind and/or solar can’t meet demand.
3) Storage: Build enough storage to get through short periods (typically a few days) when renewable output falls below 10% of nameplate capacity. Pumped hydroelectric is already practical. (Many dams in the Alps have installed pumps to send water uphill when surplus German renewable electricity is cheap and the water is released on calm winter days – when Germany is willing to pay a high price for power.) Underground storage of compressed air in natural caverns appears promising. After decades of effort, major breakthroughs in technology for renewable electricity PRODUCTION appear unlikely, but (except for batteries) breakthroughs in energy storage may be possible.
4) Use surplus electricity. About 2/3 of nameplate capacity will not be used to meet current demand and storage is/will be too expensive to save much of this surplus. In theory, the surplus can be used to make hydrogen and/or liquid fuels. Since this power would otherwise be wasted, its price will be cheap and efficiency will not be critical.
5) Demand management: Charge customers less if they are willing to curtail their demand during times of shortage. For the right discount, many customers will adapt and shift their demand to periods when electricity is in surplus.
6) Reduce overall demand through efficiency.
7) Put up with outages. 24 hours of outage per year (99.7% reliability) is common in developed countries today. It will be cheaper to accept somewhat lower reliability in return for cheaper electricity.
8) Long-distance power lines may be too expensive, have too little capacity (and be too vulnerable to attack) to be of much use.
All of these are EXPENSIVE, but technically feasible. It’s all about the cost. For British scenarios, see:
http://withouthotair.com/c27/page_203.shtml
Is 100% or 90% or 80% renewable worth the cost? Not for developing countries. Developed countries are rich enough to pay perhaps 3-5X more for renewable electricity IF THEY WISH (and are willing to subsidize their less affluent citizens). Or if they are swindled by green politicians. Nuclear would certainly be cheaper. At the moment, adaptation appears to make more sense than expensive mitigation (IMO).
You first.
As our supply of fossil fuels shrinks and becomes more expensive, we will make more use of renewable energy. The only questions are: 1) How much CO2 will be in the atmosphere when we do make significant use of renewable energy? 2) How much warming will that CO2 have caused?
1) No.
2) No.
Wasn’t there are UK Civil Engineer guy who worked out that despite the UK tripling the wind capacity over a number of years, the actual average output for the year didn’t increase much at all. Surely over building has to be viewed with healthy skepticism. And not just from the capacity vs output argument, but from the efficient use of materials argument. Over building just seems incredibly wasteful and a poor use of resources.
It’s called diminishing marginal returns, or, even negative marginal returns. Actually all renewables have negative marginal returns, and, in all likelyhood produce much more carbon dioxide on a 100% guaranteed delivered kilowatt (or whatever measure one uses), than, conventional power. I took a gander at the EIA data from 2014 recently. First of all, they lie, or, can’t add particularly with regard to overnight capital costs of solar. Hint: they thought single axis trackers and fixed rack trackers had the same overnight costs. But, that is not the point. I calculated, that, the overnight capital cost of solar, for a given 100% guaranteed delivered electron like conventional sources, is, 30X greater than conventional sources on average.
If they continue, they will disrupt the grid and destroy us. It needs to stop now.
Wind line drop costs are twice conventional line drops. Ever try to dig in mountain rock or caleche? And, they are far from the delivery point. So, the line drops costs get very large. Reality, not pie in the sky. Wind is driving merchant single site nuclear out of business with it’s productions credit — particularly in non-regulated states with stand alone reactors. They have to sell under their variable cost curve. And, you just can’t regulate reactor output. So, we have 50gw of planned nuclear shut-in in the next 6 years.
And, our new generation installs are running behind our overall shut-ins of clean reliable conventional fuels. In a few years America’s grid will get unstable. Already sub-grids have less than the necessary 25% surge capacity necessary for winter, but, particularly summer operations. There are hints of grid instability in the fire insurance data as well. And, when the grid goes down so does our electronic economy.
This scam needs to end now. But, methinks we waited too long.
That being said, I am a big advocate of solar for where off-grid is the only choice. And, new R&D needs to be sunk into it. There is a tantlyzing prospect out there — Perovskites. But, even if this technology makes it out of the lab, and, into mainstream at great cost effectiveness, the Balance of System costs will still leave solar as a niche technology —- even with a breakthrough in battery technology.