Even worse, its growing problems with wind and solar spell trouble all over the globe
Oddvar Lundseng, Hans Johnsen and Stein Bergsmark
More people are finally beginning to realize that supplying the world with sufficient, stable energy solely from sun and wind power will be impossible.
Germany took on that challenge, to show the world how to build a society based entirely on “green, renewable” energy. It has now hit a brick wall. Despite huge investments in wind, solar and biofuel energy production capacity, Germany has not reduced CO2 emissions over the last ten years. However, during the same period, its electricity prices have risen dramatically, significantly impacting factories, employment and poor families.
Germany has installed solar and wind power to such an extent that it should theoretically be able to satisfy the power requirement on any day that provides sufficient sunshine and wind. However, since sun and wind are often lacking – in Germany even more so than in other countries like Italy or Greece – the country only manages to produce around 27% of its annual electric power needs from these sources.
Equally problematical, when solar and wind production are at their maximum, the wind turbines and solar panels often overproduce – that is, they generate more electricity than Germany needs at that time – creating major problems in equalizing production and consumption. If the electric power system’s frequency is to be kept close to 50Hz (50 cycles per second), it is no longer possible to increase the amount of solar and wind production in Germany without additional, costly measures.
Production is often too high to keep the network frequency stable without disconnecting some solar and wind facilities. This leads to major energy losses and forced power exports to neighboring countries (“load shedding”) at negative electricity prices, below the cost of generating the power.
In 2017 about half of Germany’s wind-based electricity production was exported. Neighboring countries typically do not want this often unexpected power, and the German power companies must therefore pay them to get rid of the excess. German customers have to pick up the bill.
If solar and wind power plants are disconnected from actual need in this manner, wind and solar facility owners are paid as if they had produced 90% of rated output. The bill is also sent to customers.
When wind and solar generation declines, and there is insufficient electricity for everyone who needs it, Germany’s utility companies also have to disconnect large power consumers – who then want to be compensated for having to shut down operations. That bill also goes to customers all over the nation.
Power production from the sun and wind is often quite low and sometimes totally absent. This might take place over periods from one day to ten days, especially during the winter months. Conventional power plants (coal, natural gas and nuclear) must then step in and deliver according to customer needs. Hydroelectric and biofuel power can also help, but they are only able to deliver about 10% of the often very high demand, especially if it is really cold.
Alternatively, Germany may import nuclear power from France, oil-fired power from Austria or coal power from Poland.
In practice, this means Germany can never shut down the conventional power plants, as planned. These power plants must be ready and able to meet the total power requirements at any time; without them, a stable network frequency is unobtainable. The same is true for French, Austrian and Polish power plants.
Furthermore, if the AC frequency is allowed to drift too high or too low, the risk of extensive blackouts becomes significant. That was clearly demonstrated by South Australia, which also relies heavily on solar and wind power, and suffered extensive blackouts that shut down factories and cost the state billions of dollars.
The dream of supplying Germany with mainly green energy from sunshine and wind turns out to be nothing but a fading illusion. Solar and wind power today covers only 27% of electricity consumption and only 5% of Germany’s total energy needs, while impairing reliability and raising electricity prices to among the highest in the world.
However, the Germans are not yet planning to end this quest for utopian energy. They want to change the entire energy system and include electricity, heat and transportation sectors in their plans. This will require a dramatic increase in electrical energy and much more renewable energy, primarily wind.
To fulfill the German target of getting 60% of their total energy consumption from renewables by 2050, they must multiply the current power production from solar and wind by a factor of 15. They must also expand their output from conventional power plants by an equal amount, to balance and backup the intermittent renewable energy. Germany might import some of this balancing power, but even then the scale of this endeavor is enormous.
Perhaps more important, the amount of land, concrete, steel, copper, rare earth metals, lithium, cadmium, hydrocarbon-based composites and other raw materials required to do this is astronomical. None of those materials is renewable, and none can be extracted, processed and manufactured into wind, solar or fossil power plants without fossil fuels. This is simply not sustainable or ecological.
Construction of solar and wind “farms” has already caused massive devastation to Germany’s wildlife habitats, farmlands, ancient forests and historic villages. Even today, the northern part of Germany looks like a single enormous wind farm. Multiplying today’s wind power capacity by a factor 10 or 15 means a 200 meter high (650 foot tall) turbine must be installed every 1.5 km (every mile) across the entire country, within cities, on land, on mountains and in water.
In reality, it is virtually impossible to increase production by a factor of 15, as promised by the plans.
The cost of Germany’s “Energiewende” (energy transition) is enormous: some 200 billion euros by 2015 – and yet with minimal reduction in CO2 emission. In fact, coal consumption and CO2 emissions have been stable or risen slightly the last seven to ten years. In the absence of a miracle, Germany will not be able to fulfill its self-imposed climate commitments, not by 2020, nor by 2030.
What applies to Germany also applies to other countries that now produce their electricity primarily with fossil or nuclear power plants. To reach development comparable to Germany’s, such countries will be able to replace only about one quarter of their fossil and nuclear power, because these power plants must remain in operation to ensure frequency regulation, balance and back-up power.
Back-up power plants will have to run idle (on “spinning reserve”) during periods of high output of renewable energy, while still consuming fuel almost like during normal operation. They always have to be able to step up to full power, because over the next few hours or days solar or wind power might fail. So they power up and down many times per day and week.
The prospects for reductions in CO2 emissions are thus nearly non-existent! Indeed, the backup coal or gas plants must operate so inefficiently in this up-and-down mode that they often consume more fuel and emit more (plant-fertilizing) carbon dioxide than if they were simply operating at full power all the time, and there were no wind or solar installations.
There is no indication that world consumption of coal will decline in the next decades. Large countries in Asia and Africa continue to build coal-fired power plants, and more than 1,500 coal-fired power plants are in planning or under construction.
This will provide affordable electricity 24/7/365 to 1.3 billion people who still do not have access to electricity today. Electricity is essential for the improved health, living standards and life spans that these people expect and are entitled to. To tell them fears of climate change are a more pressing matter is a violation of their most basic human rights.
____________
Oddvar Lundseng is a senior engineer with 43 years of experience in the energy business. Hans Konrad Johnsen, PhD is a former R&D manager with Det Norske Oljeselskap ASA. Stein Storlie Bergsmark has a degree in physics and is a former senior energy researcher and former manager of renewable energy education at the University of Agder.
dang…..
10th Century technology expected to solve 21st Century energy issues.
Effing insane.
“10th Century technology expected to solve 21st Century energy issues”
10th century to solve a 21st century non-problem.
What are the issues that they are trying to address?
Creating a totalitarian world government.
In that case it’s suceeding.
As simple as that….. HotScot…really effing stupid.
cheers
Succint as I expect a Scotsman to be. Bravo!
HotScot: “21st Century energy issues”
Remember, my friend, we solved the world’s energy needs at 10 minutes before 2pm, 18 miles Southeast of Arco, Idaho, on December 20, 1951.
All arguments of energy issues since that time have been just a waste of energy (pun intended).
More like 4th to 6th century technology (Windmills).
Reality, instability, just as predicted by the technologically competent.
In fact it is exactly as realists have said all along.
Who are the ones in denial, really?
It is not the ones who have been right all along.
As a Dutch person living on the border with Germany, this is inaccurate.
The original purpose of the German policy was to offset as much lignite as possible. This was much easier to do before the nuclear accident in fuchashima, which pushed Germany into closing all of their nuclear power plants. This forced them to replace that energy with more lignite/coal production. In the winter months there is plenty of wind, but not enough sun, in the summer there is plenty of sun, and plenty of wind.
As most German houses do not have air-conditioning, the power plants redirect much of the electricity generated to the grid. In times of excess generation German companies sell the excess wattage to the Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, Austria etc… But this rarely happens because renewable energy only amounts to 25 – 30% of the overall energy output. This is because nuclear power dominated, and with the closure of the nuclear power plants (a mistake) they have to make up the difference in coal (lignite). As a result of all the digging and refining, the cost has gone up, but not because of renewable energy, and the emissions have remained the same, but only because of the coal substitute.
Hope this helps.
“…This forced them to replace that energy with more lignite/coal production….”
Forced?? Why didn’t they just build more renewable energy plants instead?
That apart there is something amiss with the notion that building more coal fired power stations has caused the price of electricity to rocket.
Are you really saying that coal fired power stations are more expensive to run than nuclear and then by a noticeable margin?
@Thomas Malcom
“Forced?? Why didn’t they just build more renewable energy plants instead?”
You can’t replace a regular power plant by intermittent wind/solar generators. The regulatory board still knows this (hardly anyone in politics though), so they mandated the construction of new power plants to replace the decommissioned nuclear plants. It’s mostly natural gas though, but there have been some new coal plants as well. This fact has gone mostly unnoticed by the German media, maybe because it doesn’t fit their green agenda.
“that building more coal fired power stations has caused the price of electricity to rocket”
The major cause for the skyrocketing German electricity prices is the levy for subsidising renewables that is included in the end customer price. But the nuclear shutdown is also a (comparatibely minor) contributor. Of course building all those replacement plants costs in and of itself, and it is an additional cost that would not have happened if the nuclear plants had been kept. The fact that electricity from coal is cheap as such doesn’t help in this case.
Intermittents cannot even supply the energy to mine, transport, smelt, manufacture, deliver, assemble and commission their own infrastructure much less supply its society with the energy it needs.
Ditto.
The idiots have lied to themselves. They are like children, except they run governments and pay ‘scientists’ and ‘engineers’ to write phoney studies to support the madness.
The CO2 ‘savings’ after installation of the sun and wind gathering equipment does not include the energy input to construct the green stuff and does not include the loss of grid efficiency which is around 15%.
Wind and sun gathering does not work for conceptual engineering reasons.
German average yearly output from wind farms is 17.4% of the nameplate rating of the installed wind farm.
German average yearly output from solar is only 8.3% of the nameplate rating of the installed solar panels.
Regardless of costs there are engineering limits that make it not possible to reduce anthropogenic emissions of CO2 by 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 90% with wind and solar without energy storage
German CO2 ‘savings’ does not include the energy loss as intermittent solar and wind power force the use of single cycle natural gas turbines that can be turned on/off/on/off/on/off as compared to 20% more efficient combined cycle (produce steam from the waste heat from the first pass turbines) natural gas power plants that take 20 hours to start and hence cannot be turned on/off/on/off/on/off multiple times per day in respond to changes in wind speed.
Power output of a wind turbine varies as the cube of wind speed.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-google-engineers-say-renewable-energy-simply-wont-work/
RE: “The CO2 ‘savings’ after installation of the sun and wind gathering equipment does not include the energy input to construct the green stuff and does not include the loss of grid efficiency which is around 15%.”
I have a question that may extrapolate more specificity of the 15% reduction of efficiency. Typical fossil fuel plants operate at sum 40% efficiency, I think. Does it drop efficiency from 40% to something like 40*(1-.15)=34% or something like 40-15=25%?
Meanwhile they reject fracking for nat gas and they reject nuclear, which would actually reduce that which they insist, illogically and unscientifically, must be reduced.
We are living in a Fellini film, a Kafka novel…only it is real life.
“Intermittents cannot even supply the energy to mine, transport, smelt, manufacture, deliver, assemble and commission their own infrastructure much less supply its society with the energy it needs.”
Hang on to that line … repeat often.
(maybe one more item … “and then decommission/remove”)
Solar and wind are unsustainable electric energy creation systems. This is made evident by the simple fact that a solar cell working at peek efficiency for its entire life cannot generate enough electrical energy to create its replacement. Every generation of solar cell must be created by using other energy sources.
So, for every $1 of energy I spend to make solar cells will only get me $.80 energy back, why am I wasting energy to make solar cells. Why not use the energy to do useful work?
“Solar and wind are unsustainable electric energy creation systems. ”
I’m nitpicking; energy harnessing, not creation, but point well taken!
If your figures are true, that’s a coffin nail for the solar industry. I’d like to see the math or proof of that, which sound possibly true.
Yes Rocketscientist, can you expand on this? I was just thinking about it the other day… about roof top installations generating the monetary equivalent of electricity as the end user cost for the installation. I kind of worked out it pays for itself (without tax breaks!) just about the time its going downhill solarizing.
If solar cells keep getting cheaper and more efficient, at some point they will become cost effective.
If.
But this is not such a long shot…the Sun does send a lot of energy our way.
Fact is, the world, the solar system, the entire Universe…is awash in gigantic amounts of energy.
Incomprehensible amounts that dwarf what we need to live well.
Tapping into it in the most efficient and cost effective manner is all we need to do at every stage.
And cost is how we measure what is a good deal and what is a crappy deal…wasting money is stupid.
Solar may get cheaper… good. Efficiency has not much more to go. Maybe 50% increase from where we are and no more to go! It will always take a lot of space… so rooftops maybe the best bet.
Every addition of higher-cost generation to a system results in higher costs to you, the consumer/taxpayer.
Every addition of intermittent generation to a system increases the cost of the existing system and results in higher costs to you, the consumer/taxpayer.
Every addition of unneeded remote generation to a system increases the costs of the transmission system and results in higher costs to you, the consumer/taxpayer.
Every uneconomic, politically motivated governmental action results in higher costs to you, the consumer/taxpayer.
Every incremental move to socialism results in higher costs to you, the consumer/taxpayer.
[N. B. There are no quantifiable benefits to you, the consumer/taxpayer, from any of the idiotic moves listed above. If you accept such stupidity, you are a sheep.]
Dave: My statement did not need your response. Solar on rooftops, if they cheaper and not subsidized can make sense in some situations. That said, people should be able to make the calculation based on cost – benefit, without the government forcing people to subsidize it, or forcing the grid to take excess energy when it does not need it. But today, in most cases it makes no sense. Period end of sentence.
P. S. Even if you get your sustenance from the government in one way or another, the government cannot increase your benefits to match the costs they place on the economy through their politically motivated socialistic interventions.
I do not think the government should be subsidizing solar, or green schemes–period.
And just HOW do you propose to handle the regular condition called NIGHT?
And where will we construct the fossil fueled electricity generation facilities that are required to run at idle for 60% of the time in order to back up wind and solar? In addition, do the duplicate transmission facilities that are required influence your recommendation?
I’m only an old, retired electrical engineer with a tiny brain (after all I voted for Trump), but I don’t see how anyone can claim solar and wind will ever be cost effective or cheaper than nuclear and fossil generation.
The cost of solar and wind has to include the cost of reliable backup power systems, so if you want 24/7 power, you have to buy two systems. If you think batteries will work for the potential weeks needed to backup when there’s insufficient wind or sun, then you need huge batteries and several times the nameplate rating of the RE source to charge them. This ain’t cheap, in either money or real estate.
Cheap 100% RE is fairy tale power. (I deleted the rest of the sentence that characterized the people who believe in and push this stupidity upon the rest of mankind.)
Hoppla!
Oh you know that phrase too? Menschens Kinder! You’d think the ( All educated) Politicians would know too about energy overloads / supply BEFORE they force legislation on what we should all be doing – just like IC Engines …….
The scary part is perhaps a large sub-set of the politicians do, in fact, have an accurate conceptual understanding of “energy overloads / supply” risks, and they just don’t care.
By god, if the population demands renewable energy, then politicians will give them renewable energy, laws of physics be damned.
And (pay attention; this is the important part) by the time the poo hits the fan, said politicians will be safely out of office, drawing great pensions.
The danger in using a single country as an example of what can be done is that it only works when surrounding nations use traditional power, enabling Germany to shed or purchase power from the other nations. If for example, everyone in Europe had a power system similar to Germany, the whole house of cards would fall down.
Exactly. See California.
No, Wharfplank, surrounding states provide a significant portion of CA’s electric needs. Federal Pacific Northwest hydro power props up the whole thing at taxpayer expense.
I think what Wharfplank meant was exactly that – the California house of cards would collapse absent the ability to dump excess power on its neighboring states and the ability to import power to make up for the inadequacies of their own “renewable” crap.
Absolutely California is no better than Germany. Should it install more solar and wind, the more it will depend on others, until there is a card house at hand.
Maybe we can expect more climate refugees fleeing Germany and California.
We can expect to see more climate refugees moving from Germany and California.
You do not have to wait for every country to have a similar system. Already today Poland and Czech Republik are in deep trouble when strong winds blow in Germany. There are not enough power lines between North and South. So excess power from northern or eastern Germany has to be routed through Poland and CR to southern Germany. This excess power troubles the whole grid in those two countries which is why they have to turn off their coal plants when there is too much wind in Germany. This causes higher costs and anlot of efforts to avoid shortages. Both governments stated that they will shut their interconnection if that problem continues to endanger their grids.
Which is exactly what the grid regulation authority is worried and complaining about. Some day in the near future the whole thing will fail.
Yes, that is for sure. The only question is whether those people inpolitics are in long enough in place to carry on with this stupidity. Resistance against it is rising fast. I think that government will not survive next year.
If it did, it will get even worse. They will introduce a CO2 tax and they plan to subsidize and finance directly plants for battery production incl. cell manufacturing. Nothing shows better how stupid those people are. They want to kill combustion engines and replace them by e-motors but in order to not lose jobs they want to produce batteries with an energy need of 1 MJ/kWh in exactly that country with the highest energy costs the weakest grids in the world, not to mention the gap in Know How.
Some countries around Germany think they can do better and are planning for that already…
I rather consider the green blob prefers wind and solar precisely because they cannot sustain industrial civilization.
And they don’t want to that’s what China is for..
Oddvar, Hans and Stein
Thanks for highlighting the issues involved. Note also that Germany had only 10 hours of sunshine in December 2017. And total solar & wind dropped to ~ 3% of demand for 4 days during cloudy Doldrum weather last December.
However, please do NOT overstate your argument. e.g.
“sufficient, stable energy solely from sun and wind power will be impossible”.
ALL oil, gas, and coal is finite and will NOT last for 1000 years.
Thus we must develop sustainable alternatives.
Though difficult, the most likely source is fusion. The sun is existing fusion at a safe distance, and advances are being made in on controllable fusion systems.
The issue now is to bring the cost of solar down for premium desert locations, and to provide storage to buffer variations. That is the engineering challenge before us – and it is not inherently impossible!
Premium desert locations have no grid, and there is no economical storage. Solar is a dead end. Renewables are the wave of the future…and always will be.
And fusion may never be possible as a means of electrical power generation.
If humanity did not waste time and money on bullshit and lies, we might know how much fossil fuel there really is, might have easily built and safe nuke plants, and be working much more handily towards whatever will be needed in the future.
People in the future will be much more competent to decide and create what they need when the time comes, than we can ever be now.
They will be more technically proficient and have the wherewithal that only time brings.
Unless we sabotage our educational system and technological and industrial infrastructure, bankrupt ourselves and raise generations of suicidal chicken littles and misguided ignorant fools.
There are enough coal reserves to last 500 years at present consumption rates. Undiscovered coal sources are likely much larger.
“ALL oil, gas, and coal is finite and will NOT last for 1000 years.
Thus we must develop sustainable alternatives.”
So, you suggest we should spend billions on wind and solar now, even though they are known to be a waste of money.
Why not advocate spending those billions switching to nuclear, if CO2 bothers you. Nuclear WILL last for 1000 years.
SR
for the best part of a year 4 nukes have been offline due to cracks and something else not defined. in the last couple of months 2 generators have instantly lost grid connection – this removes 500MW within seconds. currently 2 are on low load for refuelling.
Reliable??
https://www.edfenergy.com/energy/power-station/daily-statuses
Daily status report
Number of units in service:
12 of 16
Number of reactors in service:
11 of 15
ghalfrunt, you need to read the definitions of reliability and stability as they relate to electrical power systems.
Without an education and some experience in electric power operations, your opinions are worthless.
Dave Fair December 21, 2018 at 4:12 pm
ghalfrunt, you need to read the definitions of reliability and stability as they relate to electrical power systems.
——————-
does the grid handle the loss of 500MW within seconds when a turbine trips, or is it easier to handle the loss of 5MW when a wec trips, or loss of 8GW over 24hours when the wind changes. WECs will always require backup in some form, but this need not all be spinning reserve
——————
df
Without an education and some experience in electric power operations, your opinions are worthless.
——————–
sorry but you do not know my background, and I know nothing of yours.
But if you could tell me what is incorrect about my statements I will listen.
OK, ghalfrunt. I’ll waste a few more minutes on this. No more, though. I’m through with your Trolling.
As a Professional Engineer and manager, I’ve participated in every aspect of the generation, transmission and distribution of electric power. That included technical and financial feasibility studies of pretty much every aspect of the various systems.
Salesmen of every stripe, including politicians, ideologues, rent-seekers, paid Trolls and the sincerely deluded, come up with plausible, but ultimately unfeasible schemes to take one’s money. Your comments indicate you are somewhere within or influenced by this group. Your trivial truths and misdirections are manifest.
Again, go get some technical and economic training, apply it successfully in the real world and people might have a reason to believe you. I’m sorry, but you appear to have insufficient relevant education and experience for me to instruct you in the various disciplines as you requested. If I am wrong, just refute my statement. I’ve had to eat Crow before, so it wouldn’t be a novel experience.
Let’s see if I have this straight. It’s better to have a system that we know will fail many times a day, vs a system that might fail once every generation or two.
Once in a very rare while a regular plant breaks and it takes a few months to bring it back on line.
And to solve this, you want to use power sources that we know will be offline at least 2/3rds of the time and regurally go down with no warning what so ever.
one station has been offline for 1 year!
wind does not suddenly die country wide there is a slow decline which is easier to handle than 500MW tripping off in seconds
The nuke plants that exist now are very old…almost every one of them.
They were designed back when less than 20 years had gone by since it was even found to be possible.
My old 1968 Cadillac is a clunker too.
Was that you driving down Sunrise Blvd last week with the top down?
😉
Actually they will last for around 1000 years.
Which is plenty of time to develop something else.
Why try to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
Our great to the 23rd grandchildren can solve this problem using technology we haven’t even dreamed of yet.
Exactamundo!
A little bit of perspective. Australia was discovered (again) by Captain James Cook in 1770 in a sailing ship, a mere 248 years ago. According to wiki, coal powered trains were invented in 1804, mere 214 years ago.
To believe that technology in 1000 years time will be the same as it is today, is to demonstrate a complete lack of history, and perspective. To worry that we won’t have oil or coal in 100 years is just plain stupid.
An inaccurate report.
There’s no problem with frequency, the system is designed to import/export surplus (a new HVDC line is under construction to Norway for example)…
just the usual mash up of out of date stuff, too tedious to refute it
some other notes:
German spinning reserve, as elsewhere, is being replaced by the faster responding grid storage.
Germany kept France powered during the extensive reactor shut downs in recent years
The commission on shut down dates for German coal power is in session
I am not sure what multi-verse you are from but nothing you said is true or accurate. I am glad you support punishing the poor for your virtual signaling ego.
Off course are there frequency problems.
In summer, we had to 4 minutes retard over days in net frequecy leaded clocks, becaus of reduced frequency.
Ido confirm the facts. I was there at that time.
The problem with Griff is that he is never anywhere he comments on. He regularly comments on what happens here in Australia. He get’s his science from The Guardian.
Krishna Gans December 21, 2018 at 10:40 am
Off course are there frequency problems.
In summer, we had to 4 minutes retard over days in net frequecy leaded clocks, becaus of reduced frequency.
————————————–
I would be very surprised by this frequency HAS to be maintained in order for AC links to function. Frequency is maintained
The limits of frequency range allowed in normal operation (49.8 Hz to 50.2 Hz) were never reached or exceeded in this period.
The mains frequency is in all countries, which are directly connected to the synchronous grid, the same (exept short-term fluctuations). These are Albania, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Croatia, , Luxembourg, Macedonia, Montenegro, Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Czech Republic and Hungary. Due to the large east-west extension the sun takes about 3.5 hours to wander over the area, in summer the sun can bee seen about 18 hours a day
Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Western Sahara and Turkey are synchronous with the European grid, too. The other members of ENTSO-E are connected via High-voltage direct current (HVDC) power lines to the synchronous grid and have therefore independent frequencies.
http://www.mainsfrequency.com/frequ_info_en.htm
Ghalfrunt,
Which part of “It is not working” are you too stubborn and boneheaded to comprehend?
Menicholas December 21, 2018 at 5:49 pm
Ghalfrunt,
Which part of “It is not working” are you too stubborn and boneheaded to comprehend?
————————
sorry to what are you referring.
I believe that my frequency information is correct please say where I am wrong.
frequency is often adjusted +-200mHz to control load power. lowering frequency reduces supplied power.
DC links work – they are more efficient than long distant ac links. UK has many dc links with the French interconnector supplying +-2GW
Sorry, you may have look at the history of the frequecy, but I have to correct me, it was not in summer but in spring, February / March
Online measurement
You may too translate by google translate the following page:
ongoing frequecy difference
Origin of the differences were located in Serbia, Montenegro und Mazedonia.
PS:
translated by google from here
I hope to have convinced you that you are completely wrong.
What you wrote is a wish, a plan, but, as CGAW contradicted by facts and reality.
seems that what happened was a slight frequency shift of approx. 30mHz was allowed to run for a number of days. This was (and had to be) the same for the whole of the grid.
Normally in the uk grid a cycle count is eventually corrected so synchronous devices (old mains driven clocks etc) remain at correct time. The continental European frequency seems to have been kept low through “an operator” with shortage of power. The operator is not named. but there is this statement
“The power deviations are originating from the control area called Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro (SMM block) and specifically Kosovo and Serbia. ”
so nothing to do with german renewables
[??? .mod]
About 20 different reports from 2018 all state basically the same thing including the grid regulator and the German government but we should trust Griff because he says.
The fact Germany will miss it’s 2020 emission goals by 8% has already been stated by the German government but Griff is sure they are going to somehow pull a rabbit out of the hat.
Griffs credibility is ZERO.
As soon as I saw his name scroll up, I knew his post would be inaccurate.
Griff is still pissed the ever more numerous polar bears haven’t had the decency to go extinct, the result of agonizing deaths from starvation. And the anonymous & questionably (laughably?) credentialed Griff claims Dr Susan Crockford is unqualified to comment on all this.
When Griff speaks, people listen…because every now and then, everybody needs a good laugh.
Cockroaches gotta do what cockroaches do.
It’s good to see the entity known as ‘griff’ is back on WUWT, to show all and sundry the disillusional view points espoused by those which support intermittent energy power generation technology. In years past, while attempting to provide information to ‘griff’, to temper his/her/xer’s over zealotry for all things green’s, I feared ‘griff’ were scared off as our attempts to provide reality in energy related situations may have caused a modicum of doubt in ‘griff’s’ mind. But, alas, no…..plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…
Regards,
MCR
‘griff’ is back because the scam is unraveling and the alarmists and profiteers are panicking.
Having to bring griff back from retirement just shows how shallow their bench is.
Griff
Please remind me why plants and photosynthesis are bad.
And, while he’s at it, could he please explain why he hates the world’s poor so much that he backs policies that would trap them in energy poverty.
just the usual mash up of out of date stuff, too tedious to refute it
Translation: The report is accurate and Griff can’t refute it and he knows it. but because it goes against his CAGW religious beliefs he feels the need to attack it anyway.
griff defn of tedious:
the tiresome feeling that one gets when unable to rationalize/reconcile emotion & fact; related to personal fantasy being squashed by reality
No such thing as “grid storage”. It’s load shedding during over-generation, usually at financial loss, coupled with drawing dispatchable power from other countries when under-generating. Impossible to scale outwards very far before the system saturates and collapses.
“No such thing as “grid storage”. +1 The closest you can come is pumped hydro and that’s not viable in most of the world. People either have been duped or are just plain ignorant about wind and solar totally replacing fossil and nuclear energy. Even the most elementary engineering study will quickly destroy the myth yet people, mainly ecofanatics, politicians. and Elon Musk, are adamant it’s viable today.
griff likes to point to grid storage that has been installed in Austrailia as proof that grid storage can over come the problems of renewable intermittency.
What griff doesn’t tell us is that this grid storage is only designed to keep the grid stable for a couple of minutes while real power sources ramp up from hot idle to full power to take over.
Installing enough batteries to keep the system running for days would cost 100’s of thousands more. But like most green acolytes, griff prefers to hide the from the truth.
I think hundreds of thousands may understate the case by several orders of magnitude.
I should add that while hot idle does not use as much fuel as running the plant full out, it’s not a lot less.
Griff insists that the blackout in South Australia had nothing to do with the windfarms it was caused by a software glitch at a windfarm .
On the huge Tesla battery for South Australia I wrote on South Africa’s BizNews:
“Let’s do the arithmetic. Australia’s stats department gives South Australia’s power consumption in 2016 as 326 petaJoules (Pj). At 278 Gigawatt-Hours per Pj, this gives an average consumption by the state as about 248 GwH per day.Now this runs out to 10345 Megawatt-hours per hour. So, if this Musk battery really does supply 129 Mwh, it will therefore supply the state for 129/10345 hours, or about 44 seconds. So what, exactly, does spending this HUGE amount of money actually SOLVE?”
During 2003 only 2 operations were needed to stabilise the net,
2010 290 operations, in 2011 1024 op.
graph , increasing in thousands:
2013 2686 Redispatchops.,, 2014: 3453 , 2015 :6325.
some billions € in question.
Extremely interesting; thank you. Is there data more recent than 2011?
What I found and postet as text as you see 2015 = 6325 ops.
Griff,
You don’t know what you are talking about; frequency can’t be imported or exported. It is a characteristic of A/C power, not a quantity. Large spinning generators produce electricity with very stable frequency because of the huge amount of inertia in the system. And multiple generators can be easily synchronized with each other. The DC to AC convertors on the windmills and solar panels don’t produce electricity with anywhere near the same frequency stability, drifting over relatively short time frames. While they can be synchronized with another (stable) frequency source, this doesn’t work well if the other source is not stable. When you have thousands or millions of these things all connected together, chaotic behavior can emerge and cause the entire network to crash unexpectedly.
So frequency control is a problem, and it’s going to get worse as more and more wind and solar are added to the mix. But you don’t have to believe me, just wait another year or two and places like Germany and Australia will prove it. Too bad about the people that live there since they will have to put up with and increasingly fragile electrical grid.
Paul Penrose December 21, 2018 at 11:18 am
Griff,
You don’t know what you are talking about; frequency can’t be imported or exported. It is a characteristic of A/C power, not a quantity. Large spinning generators produce electricity with very stable frequency because of the huge amount of inertia in the system.
——————————
you are kidding aren’t you?
UK uses many dc links to/from Norway ireland france There is no problem linking the countries using dc to 50Hz multi GW convertors.
wind energy convertors have no problem linking to the local grid frequency, obviously. As wind drops they still provide 50Hz but less power. Some generators have non synchronous dc generators and an electronic convertor. The output of this is either exactly matching the grid or if the grid is black then 50hz can be directly generated and presumably synced to a signal to help pull up the grid.
https://www.enercon.de/fileadmin/Redakteur/Medien-Portal/broschueren/pdf/en/ENERCON_TuS_en_06_2015.pdf
Gawd. One cannot ‘black start’ the grid with renewables.
Apologies, I was sure it was available, I was wrong
from page 11:
http://response.enercon.de/files/20161117_A%20Beekmann_Grid%20Integration%20and%20Storage.pdf
BLACK START PROCEDURES
TODAY Not smart, passiv
TOMORROW smart contribution to system blackstart
The 2 documents referenced from Enercon show many features to handle grid problems for their wecs
A sales brochure.
Science fiction
No, I was serious. Non-spinning sources to the grid are frequency followers. This is not going to change any time soon.
“There’s no problem with frequency, the system is designed to import/export surplus (a new HVDC line is under construction to Norway for example)…”
Yeah, I deal with this too.
When I have a problem with something that should work, but doesn’t, they usually respond (after I prove a hundred ways to Sunday that the problem is NOT between the keyboard and the chair…) that:
1) the system was designed to do something
2) we are improving 1)
You haven’t lived until you have someone send you a slide from a presentation that says, in response to your question as to why it isn’t working, “this is how we told you it would work”.
As for “out of date stuff”, you mention something that allegedly happened in “recent years”, and a “commission” being “in session”.
Wow. Such strong facts, those.
“is being replaced by the faster responding grid storage.”
What grid storage? Except for pumped hydro which is only theoretically cost efficient possible in very few land areas, show me one place in the world that has scalable grid wide storage?
Grid storage is a very simple thing,
presumed to have enough time, you let the power turn around in the grid ’til it’s needed.
/ironie
btw, that’s what the leader of the Greens are telling us, the grind stores power !
Griff, you ignorant slut.
Now, now. Let’s be kind. Let’s not be rude to sluts.
But … but … but … its ‘the’ SNL classic!
As I said earlier this year, Griff serves a valuable function in posting the latest green “line” here (he’s just a messenger), which gives us an opportunity to post rebuttals. He should NOT be driven away by personal attacks. (It doesn’t matter if he (or she, IIRC) doesn’t engage with our critiques. He’s served his function.)
left out “misguided” there fixed it.
The progressive SNL can never be criticized as lowering itself to personal attacks. Therefore, that was no personal attack. Gotta keep your ideological imperatives straight in these discussions.
Thus giffiepoo announces to all, it’s utter ignorance and lack of education or experience.
Stunning, but definitely not a surprise.
Anyone else note a change in giffiepoo’s tone?
More aggressive and demanding.
Combining ignorance & inexperience with aggression results in low expectations and lower ability.
Look at the information tag on any electric device giffiepoo.
You will note on all of them, parameters for voltage, frequency and often amperage. All parameters that wind and solar find near impossible to supply with reliability.
Renewables are unreliable and undependable on virtually every front.
Griff, I love you dearly, but jeeeze, could you please read around the subject, and stop parroting what you have been told is true.
Where is this “Grid Storage” taking place? It is backed up in the transmission lines? In those transformer parks?
Look, when you can argue with actual facts, not press releases, please tell me where this transformation to 100% renewable (Wind and Solar) is happening. please tell me.
You will always need back up electricity production, if it is cheaper than the cost of renewables, then why shut down the existing stations? And keep insisting on expanding the amount of intermittend production that still requires back up
griff doesn’t do research, he does press releases. But only from groups who pass the ideological purity tests.
Notice griff doesn’t say anything about how hideously expensive his beloved renewables are making electricity. Not to mention that adding enough storage to make a difference is going to increase the already high costs by a factor of 3 to 4.
PS: As usual griff pretends that he doesn’t have to respond to criticisms, rather than admitting that the truth is, he can’t.
Griff,
Amazing!
You have once again managed to type a comment in which every single word is exactly and completely false.
Keep up the fine work.
You can’t use grid storage to replace spinning reserve. Even the much vaunted South Australian “larges battery in the world” will only run a very small state for five minutes. An almost completely de-industrialised one at that.
I always thought the Germans were pragmatic. Apparently NOT.
“Today Germany, tomorrow the world” didn’t work so well back then, and it’s not working now. Nothing driven by Socialist thought ever worked or ever will work.
Like the whole EU: if something doesn’t work, they’ll do more of it over and over again.
If at first you don’t succeed, raise taxes and try again.
Good Lord. The least pragmatic people on earth. The same ideological rigidity that implements this badly designed farrago of energy policies also implemented Nazism.
Indeed, they’ve had a few wobbles pragmatismwise. Marx, Barbarossa, Merkel, Diesel. On the other hand ‘No battle plan survives contact with the enemy’ (the version of von Moltke the Elder taught to my father at staff college) is good advice.
“I always thought the Germans were pragmatic.”
One word: Immigration.
Case closed.
They are completely innocent of the charge of pragmatism.
Perhaps the best course of action now is to have required courses in grade school and universities on the concepts of grid management and engineering management. This need arises from the past episodes of direct public policy intervention by the public on elimination of nuclear energy, rooftop solar with already outdated panels, and country-scale revamps of the grid. This is all about to get worse by mass moves to adopt electric cars and trucks at the same time that grid storage is being pushed. (Doing it all at the same time only works when you ignore costs as was the case with early adopter costs of solar and rooftop solar at that.)
I guess the second recommendation would be to add required ethics courses at all levels of education in the aftermath of global MPG cheating by VW and fake news writing at Der Spiegel.
Elites actually believe that any [engineering] problem can be solved by signing a check. Taxpayers will be glad to supply the money.
I once debated an electric car enthusiast who actually believed that all we needed to do to get the batteries we needed was for congress to sign a law ordering the battery companies to start building one.
At some level, VW’s “cheating” actually made sense.
The energy needs can easily be supplied by unicorn powered treadmills.
In Germany, the power of wishful thinking is unreal.
Germany is not the only country that operates under the maxim, “Es sollte also sein.”
The energy needs can easily be supplied by unicorn powered treadmills.
In addition, they (German Gouvernement) are highly involved in projects to increase the number of e-cars, with a lot more request in electric power.
They suffer from delusions of grandeur thinking they will save the world.
Ah, but, you see… the idea is that the car batteries will be used for grid storage: the cars charge when there is electricity, and the grid uses the ‘smart’ meter to suck power out of the car when there is no electricity.
Of course it means you can’t drive anywhere when it’s dark with no wind, but that’s a small price to pay for being ‘green’.
I know they’ve talked about such an idea. Wouldn’t that be fun, you charge up your car to get to you’re mothers over the weekend, only to find that your battery is flat at 7:00 am in the morning. Good one guys.
It’s easier to predict the problems with renewable energy than it is to predict the direction of climate change.
It’s not that difficult to predict climate change.
The climate will continue to do what it has done before.
“The climate will continue to do what it has done before.”
It probably will, but the speed of the changes may vary… and that is, as I can gather, the main issue.
I love that word “may.” To paraphrase Mark Twain: One gets so much fun (speculation) out of a minor, but vastly costly investment in climate science.
How does bio-fuel reduce green house gases ?
It doesnt because as soon as you cut the tree, CO2 gets released from the land that the tree was standing on. Before the tree was cut it was a sink for CO2. Burning the tree releases CO2. Biomass is a fraud.
It only reduces CO2 emissions on the books. An EU loophole allows countries to exclude CO2 emissions from wood pellets (which emit more CO2 than coal) in their reports of total emissions.
Old friend of mine once told how extensive the massive battery array he had to manage for a USA Aluminium plant was. He said it was essential to keep ready back up capable of a full duty cycle because if power failed during a production run the plant couldn’t just keep the product hanging around as is until enough power came back on to resume task completion. Some German industry probably have that kind of issue & post shows how inconvenient 100% renewables can be.
That would be a big battery array. A large aluminum smelting cell can require 200-300 K amps at roughly 4 VDC.
I would imagine the job of the batteries was to keep the lights on while the diesel generators were firing up.
And that, along with the dreaded ‘load shedding” from South Africa’s unreliable Eskom, is the reason that South Africa no longer produces aluminium!
Lose power to the heating kilns for the ingots, and you lost 8 hours production, plus wages. All it took was someone forgetting to set the kilns and the whole plant closed. I worked at Alcan Australia while I was at Burnley Uni. Interesting seeing how they sent the raw material from Queensland to New Zealand for smelting due to the guarantied electricity price they had at the Tiwai Smelter and how tight the margins were at times. And they used Tiwai because they had a 24hr/365 day supply. Accidents do happen though, and I recall a pot breakdown at Tiwai, that wasn’t a cheap repair.
That is exactly what happened when South Australia had its “Black System” event in 2016. At least one of the pots is still full of solid aluminium.
Here in Ontario the damage done from implementing “The Green Energy Act” is horrific. The waste is approaching $100 billion. Nothing close to the $ waste in Germany but still a fiscal boondoggle of irresponsible spending unmatched in Canadian history.
Shutting down coal…for no reason other than the fervid imaginations of some very influential people. For jurisdictions without access to natural gas, coal is by far the safest, least expensive and quickest route to base load power for the grid. But try telling that to any of our academic, media and governing elites and they will perceive you as a conspiracy nut.
Not only did these people shut down coal, they spent double digit billions refurbishing old nukes that should have been decommissioned, then unbelievably investing multiple billions in wind/solar parks along with the required conventional back-up and creating an almost daily requirement for excess “alternative” power to be sold to the spot market for a fraction. On top of all that…a carbon tax.….total $fiasco and no reason for it.
All they had to do was hook up to the hydro power availible from Quebec. By making gasoline and electricity more expensive these people think they can change the clouds, and they have the blessing from our educated, political and media elites.
Furthermore we have elected a new government and “The Green Energy Act” is not up for discussion. In this neck of the woods if you are not on board with the politically correct man-made climate change alarmist narrative you are irrelevant.
The following is a quote from Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit, comments section. May 7, 2016.
“Which choice is better? To toss out the predictions as worthless, or to take action on the grounds that the Earth’s heating might still be too large?
I, for one, have never been sold on the idea that inconsistency between models and observations on one issue makes them “worthless” or renders concern moot. Over the years, I’ve discouraged this interpretation of Popperianism, if indeed it is a valid interpretation of Popperianism.
If this was something uncontroversial like modeling smelter or refinery throughput, a similar degree of inconsistency would prompt re-tuning of the models, not throwing them out. However, academic climate modelers have stubbornly refused to do so. Since they have refused to do so, it is entirely reasonable for me to comment on the inconsistencies. I have a particular annoyance on this topic as McKitrick et al 2010 was misrepresented in AR5 and an earlier submission pointing out false results in Santer et al 2008 was rejected, thereby permitting Santer et al 2008 to be used in policy relevant documents by US CCSP and EPA.
If change over the next 50 years is more likely to be of the same order as change over the past 50 years, as opposed to the accelerated changes contemplated in the climate models, that is surely relevant to the development of policies that are commensurate with and appropriate to the actual problem. Unfortunately, it also seems to me that much of the climate science community has, in the name of doing “something”, promoted feel-good but pointless or resource-dissipating self-indulgences such as windmills.
In Ontario, unwise subsidization of wind resulted for example in purchase of 3 TWH of power from wind crony at a cost of $450 million in 2015-4Q alone, which was sold to neighboring jurisdictions for $5 million. We not only lost $400 million in one quarter, but over charged hard pressed industry in Ontario while subsidizing competing industry in Michigan, New York and Ohio. A more toxic policy is hard for me to contemplate. And yet our politicians want to expand this program”
Germany has almost three times as many people as Canada, and far less land per person.
And Germany does not have the largest economy in the world a hop skip and jump from the majority of their population.
Not sure where I am going with this, except that, Canada has not gone anywhere near as far down the road to ruin as Germany…plus y’all got that Athabasca.
I wonder if Germany would be doing what they are doing if they had vast natural resources and yuge tracts of land?
Or would they be like Australia…wasting money “going green”, while continuing to export coal that will get burned…just somewhere else?
Once again,
United States Climate Alliance, take note.
It would be interesting to develop a business case for a power consumption service. A business that does nothing but use excess power from the grid when prices go negative. Simply creating waste heat for example, or repeatedly lifting a large mass.
I think such a plan has already been formulated, MJB, at least in outline.
Those heavy masses going up and down can be used to stamp out the teaspoons with which the proletariat will enjoy full employment to dig out sand. The waste heat would then be used to melt said sand into glass, with which glaziers will replace the broken windows after the periodic proletariat revolts. Win-win!
(By the way, I have not seen a single peep about the “economic stimulus” that the Yellow Vests have gifted various European cities with. Perhaps because the vandalized establishments are mainly those that they frequent and that will be raising prices for the costly repairs?)
Or even to power lights and fans to run solar panels and wind turbines to sell electricity back to the grid.
If you were feeling dishonest, you could create a separate entity right next door that takes your energy and sells it back to the grid. A kind of perpetual money machine!
So much possible graft, so little time!
You mean like running diesel generators at night to get solar subsidies?
I remember a potential client in Canada asking me to design a cloud based system that would start diesel generators to pump into the grid based on spot prices sourced from the web. Sounded like a good idea at the time to harvest stupidity of government.
We do this in the UK, its called the STOR mechanism. Businesses with emergency generators can offer their spare capacity for a standby fee, and if used, a cost per unit of electricity.
Madness….
“To fulfill the German target of getting 60% of their total energy consumption from renewables by 2050, they must multiply the current power production from solar and wind by a factor of 15. They must also expand their output from conventional power plants by an equal amount, to balance and backup the intermittent renewable energy.”
— I don’t understand why the conventional output would need to be increased. If renewables supply 5% of power, and backup already exists to supply the other 95% and to back up the 5%, then does not all the needed capacity already exist?
They want to replace transportation fuel and other industrial fuel use with electric. There will be enormous battery charging loads added, which will have peak demand periods.
You’re welcome 😉
Anyone who thinks locations farther north than 40º latitude are suitable for solar power is barmy in the crumpet.
One of my favorite facts about Germany is that the southernmost point in Germany is at Oberstdorf which has a latitude of 47°25’N. For geographically challenged Americans, that is just a couple of miles south of Bemidji MN.
Meanwhile, both Germans and Canadians think that it is WARMING they need to be worried about!
I was very disappointed to learn just upthread that even one such as Steve McIntyre thinks that a somewhat, or even a much, warmer Earth is in any way a potential problem.
This notion is actually the centerpiece of global warming alarmism, and without this delusional misapprehension the entire meme would have never arisen.
And yet it is the thing that gets the least attention in terms of refutation, and is even swallowed whole by otherwise intelligent skeptics.
Kafkaesque.
“barmy in the crumpet”
!
Now that was funny…for some reason.
I has to steals it.
See, we do not need Griff after all.
His twaddle is, as I originally suspected, 100% worthless.
BTW…laughing real suddenly while eating pork rinds can blow the dust up into the nasal passages, and it turns out that stings as much as milk out the nose.
Still, thank you for the belly laugh!
littlepeaks,
you would be amazed coming bach to Flensburg today.
They just build large solar parks along the Autobahn just south of Flensburg.
Just trust the German government, they know what they do…
In Canada StatsCan just released figures showing how worthless green industries have been since 2007.
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/philip-cross-statcan-just-exposed-how-worthless-green-industries-are-to-canadas-economy/wcm/80ff5fb7-de2b-4e3a-b092-7814d213d77d
In summary,
There are two lessons to be drawn from the tepid growth of Canada’s green sector. It will be a long time, if ever, before it makes a significant contribution to jobs and income in Canada. And in the meantime, even its marginal and largely meaningless existence will be expensive for both taxpayers and electricity customers
Here’s a an explanation given by an undercover RCMP agent who is speaking out from Hong Kong, exposing how we got into this mess in Ontario.
https://www.caravantomidnight.com/Episode/EpisodesDetails?Id=21017
Episode 1014
Vorsprung durch Arschlöcher
You know, cheat the emissions tests. Build windmills and solar panels that real engineers know don’t work. Make it law that all EU countries have to buy your windmills.
Brexit reminds me of that Dylan song:
“Then you ask why I don’t live here?
Honey, how come you don’t move?”
Masters of the bluff and masters of the proposition
But the enemy I see wears a cloak of decency
Bob Dylan, Slow train coming
https://youtu.be/ZNi26Ro96ro
I don’t understand. Are you saying that usually they produce 27% and at the maximum more than 100%?
If so they need only 4 times the actual plants, why you say 15?
They overproduce, and are paid for shutting down the input, as the net can’t cope.
What you are not understanding are two things:
1) The energy produced is unreliable and intermittent. At say 1PM, the sun is shining strong and the solar panels are producing more than the consumers are using *at that point in time*. At 1 AM (or 1PM on a dark, rainy day) the sun is not shining, and the panels are producing ZERO energy. So the max of 100%+ is irrelevant, as it’s only a temporary condition. You can’t plan your power base off of the assumption that you have bright sunshine 24×7.
2) the 27% is in reference to electricity only. The 15X is in relation to total energy needs, not just electricity:
“solar and wind power today covers only 27% of electricity consumption and only 5% of Germany’s total energy needs,”
“To fulfill the German target of getting 60% of their total energy consumption from renewables by 2050, they must multiply the current power production from solar and wind by a factor of 15”
Though it does seem like only a factor of 12 is needed to go from 5 to 60, but I’m guessing there’s some rounding going on in those figures (60 is 15×4).
I see. Thank you for your kindly reply.
There may be some missing links in those figures.
Like mining ores, or coal, or extracting fossil fuels, you go after the most efficiently used sources first. Then you start on the less efficient (but still viable) sources.
For wind and solar, the resource is, largely, land. Where does the wind blow with the best reasonably constant force? That is where you put your first windmills. Those windmills are always going to be your most efficient ones. After that, you use the sites that provide less wind, or less constant wind – and they are always going to be less efficient. Much the same applies to solar.
(Another factor in siting these facilities is how far you have to go to connect generation to consumption – the farther you have to go, the more you lose just getting the product to the user. Which is another problem with both wind and solar; a large portion of the best sites are a long ways away from where you need the power.)
The 27% refers to the total annual demand. The overproduction refers to the demand of the moment.
Now, myself, I’m not sure whether the 27% is after accounting for the forced export from those periods when overproduction is happening. If not, the portion of actual annual demand from German consumers that is being supplied by “renewables” is quite a bit smaller. Like “nameplate” capacity compared to actual generation, the percentage of annual demand is subject to fudging by Green governments.
All that excess German wind and solar energy at peak times, just needs a bit of liebensraum.
“liebensraum” = love room
“Lebensraum” = living-room, or, with a different, not pc connotation “Lebensraum” (im Osten…)
Not to be confused with Liebestraum (by Liszt), which I used to play fairly well.
Those who were obsessed with Lebensraum loved his”Préludes” a bit too much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8dvw1kzgsg
(14:20)
jorge
If you played Liszt you must be good.
Once I could just about make it to the end of Beethoven’s moonlight sonata.
But I was never any good at sight-reading.
Thanks for the language correction.
Electrons have feelings too though.
What is life without love?
AlGore
OUCH! That had to hurt.
‘Germany took on that challenge, to show the world how to build a society based entirely on “green, renewable” energy.’
Costa Rica tried to go 100% renewable, but if you speak to anyone that’s ever visited or lived there for more than a day in recent years one of the first things they’ll tell you is the that blackouts are an everyday clockwork-like occurrence.
If Germany gets excess power, they can just install two humongous electrodes in the Baltic Sea and boil sea-water/cook fish.
The negative prices would be a great opportunity to make glaciers. Wouldn’t it be fun to have a piece of mountain property that was rigged to make snow when the prices go negative. Create your own private glaciers.
“… the country only manages to produce around 27% of its annual electric power needs from these sources.”
I doubt that. “Renewable”, ok, but this includes hydro and biomass. Solar and wind are about 15%.
(renewables from 20111, wind and solar are larger today)
If green energy actually worked capitalism would have proved it long ago. Especially wind which isn’t exactly new technology.
Indeed, there are reasons why mankind moved away from wind-power in previous centuries. Mainly to do with better, more reliable sources of energy (such as from fossil fuels) being available.
Germany became a nation of green morons. Hard coal under German soil is said to last for 200 years minimum.
But the time of “home grown” hard coal is finally over. Germany just shut down their remaining two hard coal mines once and for
goodbad. Instead, they chose to chop down the Hambach Forest for a brand-new open-cast lignite coal mine. This time, the green blob went berserk rightfully but couldn’t change a thing.The green blob fosters Frankensteins beyond their control.
As for those closed for good coal mines…I doubt it.
Freezing to death and starving has a way of concentrating the mind.
It is only a matter of time.
History shows that it is wise to have a reserve or backup. Even when not needed, these reserves or backups provide and preserve the knowledge of mining, in this case. If something goes terribly wrong, there will be no hard- coal miner left who has learned the art of digging for coal. These politruks are giving away technology and knowledge collected in hundreds of years w/o anything in return. It’s a shame.
Don’t worry, the Chinese will buy the mines and bring in their own people to run them.
/sarc
Chinese? Apparently happening right now in South Africa. AND they are going to build their own, private, coal-fired power station to feed their own, private, industrial estate, which, in a country with a 28% (and counting) unemployment rate, will be most likely be staffed with their own, private, countrymen!
Digging is not difficult.
People hundreds of years ago figured out how to do it on a large scale, and figured it out very quickly.
And even with no such thing as electric lamps or power tools, within a short time country after country learned how to mine coal on a huge scale.
I am not disagreeing that it is good to have back-ups, or anything like that.
I am saying that when people start dying or even suffering greatly, well, it may not be a great idear to be the person trying to prevent getting at what is needed.
People do not like being forced to suffer because someone else said so.
And history is replete with examples of what happens when the masses have had enough.
The shutdown of hard coal mining in Germany is not motivated by green ideology but by economics, even though I’m sure the greens love it.
The hard coal layers in Germany’s largest mining region, the Ruhr conurbation, are rather deep and at an angle. The most accessible ones in the south of the Ruhr area were mined in the 19th century and have long been exploited. Through the 20th century mining moved slowly north where the layers get deeper. It’s now at the northern edge of the Ruhr conurbation where it’s already very deep and expensive to mine. They could go further north, there’s enough coal there. But for cost reasons it was decided to shut it all down. Cheaper hard coal is imported instead.
Most mines have been running at a loss from the 1960s/70s on, and therefore probably they’d all have shut decades ago if it wasn’t for government subsidies. To cushion the blow for the mining regions, and for strategic reasons, huge subsidies went into hard coal mining from the 1970s onwards, but the idea was to shut it down eventually, just later than capitalism would have done otherwhise.
On the other hand, lignite mining in Germany is running at a profit. The greenies want to shut that down too, and this time it’s for purely ideological reasons. So far it hasn’t started, but the green media are campaigning for a shutdown.
Oh? I didn’t get that take on it all – this past week, one of the Main TV Channels devoted time to a church service celebrating the closure of the LAST deep mine somewhere in the Ruhr.
AS far as the Lignite / Opencast mining – there’s a big anti-mining effort on the go where MORE Villages are to be destroyed – don’t know where the folk are being decanted to… not the first time some of them have had to move on.
Between Open Cast in populated areas and deep mining leading to Land settling ( as we are becoming increasingly aware of in the UK ) this is a more serious topic for settling than fracking and oil extraction from same IMHO
In the past, villages that had to be abandoned for mining were resettled to a new place somewhere in the same region. The inhabitants get compensated for their lost real estate. Usually the new settlements would be given the same name as the destroyed one. I wonder if this will go on in the future, given the current political climate.
German Utility companies have lost $billions because of renewable grid priority. Without grid priority there wouldn’t be any renewables. Everything about renewables is bad somethings worse than others. Not worthless, worth less than nothing. Amazing what corrupt politicians and willfully uninformed voters can accomplish when they “team up”.
Utility companies shouldn’t be penalized when they are forced by political mandates to contend with “off spec” poor quality power from dozens of wind farms with dozens of turbines all operating at different times and producing different quantities and qualities of electricity.
Wind power causes problems with:
Voltage regulation (magnitude and frequency)
Voltage sags and swells
Harmonics and inter harmonics*
Real and reactive power
Sub synchronous resonance issues due to interaction of the electric network
and the complex shaft/gear system of the wind turbine.
*Harmonic currents can produce a number of problems:
1. Equipment heating
2. Equipment malfunction
3. Equipment failure
4. Communications interference
5. Fuse and breaker mis-operation
6. Process problems
7. Conductor heating.
Take off the solar and wind subsidies and both industries crash tomorrow.
With world energy demand increasing 1.5% per year, solar and wind cant keep up with just this increase. Right now they total 1.1% of energy supply. And this after 30 years of massive subsidies
There is at least one country doing very well out of all this wind/solar installation: Norway. Because they get almost 100% of their electricity from hydro, they can take other countries’ excess power and just adjust their hydro output to balance. This is why Holland has an HVDC link to Norway and I guess Germany either has one or is building it now.
I’d love to know how much money Norway makes on the split: get paid to take power nobody else can use and then charge spot market rates to sell it back when it’s dark and windless. Norway is functioning as Europe’s battery for excess renewable output.
This allows other European politicians to hide the true cost of their plunge into wind and solar. I don’t think Norway has any pumped hydro (why would they need it?), so they can only take excess power equal to actual domestic usage at any given moment. When highly renewable countries have more excess power than Norway needs, I don’t know what they do; perhaps build a couple of aluminum smelters. If other people pay you to take their excess power, it drives the cost of aluminum production way, way down.
Reality check:
Population of Norway = 5.3M;
Population of Europe = 741.4M
Understood, but remember two things: (1) not every country in Europe has installed large amounts of intermittent sources, and (2) even those that have will only need to dump excess intermittent power at a loss when they have exhausted other balancing measures. Still, the countries which have built or are building HVDC links to Norway are doing so because they have to, not because Norway is asking for it.
When you desperately need something for which there is only one seller, guess who gets the best deal?
What you are pointing out is there is a limit on how much excess power Norway can absorb. If installed intermittent capacity in Europe continues to increase that limit will be reached at some point. Which is why I speculated that new aluminum smelters might be in Norway’s future.
I see that one German aluminum facility is already looking at how they can keep operating with unreliable power. The article title appears to be about a new “green battery”, but it’s really about how to adapt to variable power.
I don’t understand your logic, it is not desirable for any country to act as a “buffer” for another country’s wether dependent generation, regardless if the buffer is hydro, coal, or nuclear. The temporal shutting down of their own power plants is a cost factor, but they don’t profit from having to do that.
The idea of some of the German greens (maybe elsewhere too) about Norway is something else. They know they need huge storage capacity to run the grid off wind or solar alone, and they’re looking at Norway as a location for pumped storage. So far Norway’s hydro plants are not pumped, just plain reservoirs. The German greens want Norway to transform some of them into pumped storage, build a huge line across the North Sea, and then store German wind/solar energy over in times when there’s a surplus, and retrieve it back in times of low wind and sun.
Of course these installations would first have to be built in Norway, at enormous costs that someone has to pay, and Norway would only let Germany use them at a price. Both of which would ultimately be paid for by the German households, on top of all the green surcharges they already pay on their electricity bills. At this time that plan is cloud cuckoo land, and so far nobody has asked the Norwegian people how they feel about it.
Sorry, but this is a myth:
“Norway is functioning as Europe’s battery for excess renewable output.”
Norways elecricity output (all hydro) is roughly 1 % of the EU output. In a normal year Norway is able to export 10 % of its Hydro output, which is insignificant when it comes to functioning as Europe’s battery.
The Norwegian HVDC links to Holland, Germany, Scotland (being built) are hideously expensive, the bill is sent to Norwegian consumers. Ohms Law is still relevant, so there is a substantial loss in these links.
Norway has plenty of politicians who want to save the world from the CO2 demons changing our climate, so a huge number of windmills are being constructed, with green certificates ensuring the mill owners get paid twice the market value of the energy produced – the bill is again sent to the consumers. Shortly our electricity will be more expensive than in neighboring Denmark.
There is no sane reason for this windmill construction, since 110 % of our electricity consumption is being covered by hydro.
I”m so far off-topic you can slap me but;
NASA says we’ve experienced 13% “greening” of the Earth over the last thirty years (due to fossil fuel CO2 emissions).
More CO2 in the atmosphere causes more plant growth which then causes more O2 creation. ?
Are we adding both CO2 and O2 and increasing the volume of our atmosphere?
Just wondering.
It’s the plants 🌱 that are taking CO2 from the atmosphere and adding O2. O2 allows humans and multicellular life in general to exist. The only reason that there is O2 in the atmosphere is because of plants. And the only reason that there are plants is because of CO2.
But CO2 is bad, because … it’s bad.
So plants that like CO2 must be bad too.
And humans that like plants are also bad, especially vegans.
None of this adds up, so there is this huge excess of righteousness in the biosphere, that allows governments to sell carbon credits and build wind turbines and solar arrays for no reason.
slap
It’s a net zero or zero sums game. H2O and CO2 combine to make hydrocarbon solids, and O2 is expelled as a waste product. So liquid H2O and gaseous CO2 are converted into solids and gas.
Riddle me this: The energy from the sun is converted into solids, changing radiation into stored energy in the form of hydrocarbons… Is this a net endothermic cooling reaction? Does growing plant life cool its surroundings?
Sure, that is the only way the energy budget can add up
/Jan
I think so too. Would make for an interesting science experiment to devise a mini environment one with plants growing, and the other with all the same ingredients, except similarly colored plastic plants while monitoring temperature.
There’s no need. The chemistry of photosynthesis demonstrates that net energy is absorbed by plant growth. Conservation of energy must be adhered to, it’s not optional.
Id have to admit that in not certain about the energy budget when decomposition is factored in, however. Working that out should not be difficult, but it’s beyond me.
Huh: I understand and agree with you. Still would be a nice science experiment for high school or jr high. growing trees cool the planet… until which time the crackin is released by campfire, wood pellet stoves, or some other evil human conjours up.
Slight correction: The sunlight is converted in covalent bonds.
Not a solid.
In fact, electrons barely exist.
Just ask Schrodinger’s cat.
There is no past, and there is no future.
Just one, long, ever-present now. No…now. Wait…now…now…now…now…nownownow…
^dang*
Someone’s had some eggnog spiked of course 🙂
Zig Zag: A pile of mulch will generate heat while decomposing. I don’t know if this is caused by bacteria or if they are incidental. Hey stacks have been known to burst into flame while stacked in a barn if they contain too much moisture when stacked.
Mulch with organisms feeding on it is exothermic. Whenever hydrocarbons separate into CO2 heat is released in the “burn”.
It’s not true eggnog if it hasn’t been spiked.
of course…
Intuitively, I’d say no. Heat/energy that enters our atmosphere is still here whether as part of a plant or not. Eventually it may leave our planet but not because of plants.
I’m taking the word “surroundings” to mean our entire planet.
Temperature and energy are not the same thing. I said if energy gets converted from radiant to hydrocarbon, it should be endothermic and cool it’s surroundings.
Thanks, I’m no physicist. Interesting topic.
Albert,
Oxygen is never created. What plants do is splitting CO2 into Carbon and oxygen. The carbon is combined with hydrogen from water (H2O) to form solid plant material and the oxygen is released into the atmosphere.
Fossil fuel consist mostly of hydrogen and carbon which combines with oxygen in the combustion process to form CO2 and H2O. Since more oxygen is consumed in this combustion than gained in worldwide net plant growth, the atmospheric level of O2 is falling, but that is not much of a problem since we have so much of it.
/Jan
Change in Volume (or density) is not measurable at the amount theorized.
In theory there is more stuff. But a volume change cannot be estimated within realm of unknowns. Just like temp.
When fossil fuels are burned it uses O2 in the atmosphere to create the CO2. This cancels out gains from increased plants. Keep in mind were talking about variations of O2 in the .01% range of the 20.95% in the atmosphere.
Green energy is about power – political power. Thepower to control a poulation. For millenia, food has been tried and usually fails, especially in rural areas.
Now they (the Marxist/Socialists) are attempting to bring rural areas to heel with control of their energy, and the fuels they need to produce food (animals and grains).
And the even more sinister effort to control the population, at least in Europe, is with Islamization and the Sharia law to comes with it to erase popular democracy.
As a legal system, the Sharia law is exceptionally broad. While other legal codes regulate public behavior, Sharia regulates public behavior, private behavior, and even private beliefs. Compared to other legal codes, the Sharia law also prioritizes punishment over rehabilitation and favors corporal and capital punishments over incarceration. Of all legal systems in the world today, the Sharia law is the most intrusive and restrictive, especially against women.
Which makes Sharia law the ultimate eco-fascist political system. What I find amazing, is the ignorance of European women to the fact that its as the Left embraces Islamic immigration, it holds two diametrically opposed beliefs when its comes to women’s rights on one hand and the restrictive controls on women that comes with Islamization on the other. George Orwell predicted this kind of behavior in the drift towards a totalitarian political system and he called this Double Think.
Fellini Film I tells ya!
Living it.
Nor by 3030.
The best that can be said is that they are teaching the rest of the world to avoid such expensive mistakes made by worshiping the false god of modern environmentalism.
So,,,,,,,,,, Germany is a world leader in providing 5% of their energy needs via wind and solar? 5%, with all the money spent and pain inflicted on their population? 5%? I guess it is a big step up over the global numbers of, what 1%? The only time wind and solar look even remotely good is when the get lumped in the renewable category of which the predominate source of energy in that category comes from the CO2 producing process of burning wood and Dung. Perhaps some Germans should start cooking their dinners with Dung to help with their rediculous targets.
Unfortunately the BS produced by politicians is not combustible. If it were we’d have an endless supply of bio fuel.
Actually wind and solar are made to look good by lumping them together with hydro, which is the ONLY “renewable” electricity worth a damn. Which of course means Eco-Nazis are against it.
Everything is renewable.
Some are just slower to do so.
That depend on how you define renewable, and I think this is a misleading one. When we use fossil fuel, it is gone forever. Fossil fuel is non-renewable. Oil was formed from dinosaur fat several million years ago. When we burn a gallon of gasoline it will not form new fossil energy again on a human time scale. That is unquestionably a non-renewable resource.
Land-use is not in the same category. After all we do not consume land, we just occupy it for some time period. If our grandchildren want to use the land for some other purposes, they can do that. The land does not vanish because we have built windmills or solar plants there. You may argue that we have occupied it for a long time by bad investments, but the land is still there.
Therefore, I think it is misleading to label land-use as non-renewable resource.
Similar with chemical elements like iron, sink, copper, rare earth elements et cetera, they never disappear. We can use the same chemical elements repeatedly forever. In my opinion that does not qualify as a non-renewable.
/Jan
Oil from dinosaur fat?
O yes I forgot – we’re not allowed to mention photosynthesis or plants any more, wouldn’t want to risk implying anything good about CO2 would we?
Among their growing litany of lies the Climagisterium have found it necessary, contrary to straightforward evidence such as bomb test nuclide fallout, to assert the fantasy that CO2 in the atmosphere is more or less immortal and never leaves it.
Thus “carbon” in the atmosphere is as stable and durable as carbon in fossil fuels.
So in the atmosphere carbon is still a fossil fuel, just like before.
Thus all carbon is renewable.
Everything on earth comes from a supernova (except hydrogen) and is renewable.
Thank you Tasfay,
I see that you are right about dinosaurs, I remembered the dinosaur theory from an old school lesson and wrote it without checking. I see now that newer science tells that it was formed by bacteria, not big animals.
However, that does not make any difference for my point. Fossil fuel was formed several million years ago, and when we burn it, it will not return to that form in any human time scale.
That the carbon is stable is beside the point. The value of fossil fuel is in its internal energy, which is released when we burn it. That energy is only released only once, and therefore the energy is non-renewable.
/Jan
At the end of the day, what’s the issue? You’re kind of arguing that, having found yourself marooned on an island, you should stop burning the sticks and branches you forage up to keep yourself warm during the cold nights just because the trees don’t grow fast enough (and drop branches and twigs that dry quick enough) to replenish them at the rate of what you burn, all while slowly becoming ill and dying of exposure to the cold. Better to keep burning the sticks and branches while you figure out other ways to warm yourself, rather than die fretting over the notion that someday you’ll run out of sticks and branches to burn.
Fossil fuels are sustainable until they run out. Since we’re nowhere near that point, we should continue to use them until we come up with something better. Newsflash – windmills and solar panels ain’t it.
The geological formations from which we are able to economically extract oil is not the source of th4e supply, and does not represent the amount of oil in the ground.
Under those oil bearing formations are the layers of rock that contain the real reservoir, and they are many times larger then the amounts that we can get out immediately. Some oil bearing formations fill from below as fast as oil is pumped out of them. Some wells that went dry decades ago can be reopened and more oil pumped, already. Give it a hundred years and better technology.
Besides, there is surely many times what experts tell us is left…as has been the case for over 100 years.
And beyond that, making gasoline or another liquid fuel is just a question of energy.
Right now we can dig it and drill it and pump it for very cheap prices.
Does it seem strange that the places like the US where we spend a lot of time and money looking for oil, we find giant amounts of it? Ever more.
Ten years ago experts, some of them anyway, said there was not enough oil under the US to bother looking for, and now we are again the leading producer in the world.
And all the increase is on private lands, and public lands are enormous by comparison, and entire regions known to be some of the richest plays are off limits.
There is a lot of sedimentary rocks under the ground and under the seafloor…and likely more oil than even the most optimistic have speculated. We pump more than ever in more places than ever and yet we have more known reserves and estimates of oil in place than ever and the price is getting cheaper.
Accounting for inflation, it is getting towards the low end of the historical range since WWII, and falling fast, which large producers slashing production to prop up prices, and yet it falls anyway.
We will never pump the last barrel of oil…ever.
Chemistry aint voodoo and it aint rocket surgery neither.
We can make it if we needed to, and we do not need to.
So relax.
For generations we drilled right through the rock – shale! – that held unimagined tanker loads of hydrocarbon, oil that we are now able to harvest cheaply, safely and abundantly with today’s tools. I wonder what else we are drilling right through?
So Germany is now “the dog that caught the car”. And instead of reevaluating the decisions that led to this situation, they are doubling down on stupid.
They think if they just work harder at doing more “stupid” they can drag this car home, and impress the neighbors with their “skills”.
Sad to see a public psychosis take hold of those in power. And watch as economic chaos starts a downward spiral. Take a good look at Venezuela. They are further along this process, but that is where “doubling down on stupid” will take you.
Has anyone thought to check (audit) the power output from old solar rooftop panels in Germany. They weren’t very efficient to begin with and started declines in year two. By 2020 they will amount to rooftop virtue signaling tiles.
To give a sense of scale on grid storage; according to Wikipedia, Germany’s installed electrical generating capacity is about 198 gigawatt. 10 days of power output at this level is 198 x 24 x 10 = 47,520 Gw-hr. By contrast WORLD output of lithium ion batteries is of the order of a couple of hundred Gw-hr a year
We are nowhere close to the point where lithium batteries can make any significant dent in time-shifting grid-scale energy. They may have a role in supplying the grid for a matter of seconds whilst other facilities come on line.
As regular readers may know I am a fan of EVs but I detest grid scale windmills. A lot of structure, a lot of maintenance, a lot of visual blight for negligible return
And the potential for bidding up the price for Lithium. Storage of electricity is a critical factor for many electrical systems, and electronic products. The more they depend on Lithium, the greater the risk of price spikes crushing those use massive quantities of Lithium, and compete against products that don’t require those batteries. EVs are vulnerable to a bidding war Lithium.
What if Russia and other countries dependent on oil sales, decide to buy up worldwide supplies of Lithium? Who is going to stop them?
You make a very good point. And until the time that renewable energy can be made to act as “dispatchable” it will fail as a reliable power source. Reliable renewable power will not happen until a cheap (very cheap), small, quick charging, extended life battery with the potential to hold significantly more power than the present batteries can hold is invented. We are talking about several quantum leaps in battery technology. When this happens we will most likely have another form of energy generation that makes the present wind and solar efforts look primitive. In the mean time, all solar and wind farm generation facilities are just monuments to stupidity.
It will never happen that batteries become more efficient by orders of magnitude.
Try looking up how much batteries have improved since back when doctors scoffed at the notion of germs causing diseases, and the telegraph was wondrous technology.
We have made more progress on flying cars, ray guns, and communicators just since the first episode of Star Trek aired than we have made in battery tech in three times that long.
Like fusion, just because someone can think of it, does not mean it is only a matter of time before it is a reality.
And capacity is only the first problem with batteries. They cost out the wazoo, waste a lot of power, and then become useless after a few years or a few hundred to at best a few thousand duty cycles. Grid scale battery storage is a pipe dream. Aint happening, unless someone can figure out how to make ones that are dirt cheap and use iron or sand or something.
IOW…likely never.
*cue the person assuring us they have it almost licked*
A lot of visual blight and health problems for those who live close to them, and for NEGATIVE returns, when ALL COSTS are considered (they seldom are, as their champions endlessly “promote” them to the next round of suckers).
Everyone knows that solar power doesnt work. That’s why the ISS is powered by coal, but they don’t tell anyone.
Are you under the impression that the ISS is equivalent to cities in Europe? I did not see anyone saying that solar power doesn’t work. I did see many who think it is not an appropriate source of electricity for the modern world. It is fine for remote locations, that don’t have access to base load electricity. Especially those locations that have to “bring your own atmosphere”.
A space station is very different from an industrialised country.
The ISS:
– Has sunlight not obstructed by the atmosphere or weather nearly 100% of the time.
– Rechargeable batteries for the short periods of sunout need not have a huge capacity.
– Its surface/electricity consumtion ratio is very favourable
– There are few workable options: It’s either solar, nuclear or not have a space station at all. There are spacecraft and probes that use nuclear.
– Cost is not really an issue, so they go for whatever works at whatever it costs.
This isn’t entirely wrong, but it is misleading.
Part of the reason why they haven’t achieved emissions reductions is because they are replacing nuclear energy with wind and solar. After Fukushima, Germany decided to shut down their nuclear fleet – completely unrelated to the goals of expanding wind and solar.
The same basic thing is happening in California.
Every organization with serious decarbonization goals realizes that nuclear is needed. Wind and solar are optional add-ons. Unless magic season-scale storage is invented, the foundation of any electric sector decarbonization plan has to be nuclear.
Yeah but nuclear WORKS and provides useful energy. Similar to hydro, the Eco-Nazis just won’t have it.
Exactly.
The people pushing climate change fearmongering are against any real solutions.
And besides for that, CO2 is the essential basis of the entire biosphere and it is a tiny trace gas.
Rounded to the nearest 1/10th of 1%, the amount in the air is zero.
That sounds very low for something that, if it every ran out, would mean the end of every plant and animal on Earth, forever.
It’s a religion. No sacrifice too great. To be pure, you must submit and pay moar.
Well WHO with a science education (16 years) would have guessed otherwise? Why do I see Nuremberg Rallies in my mind every time i see a climate conference?
“Germany has installed solar and wind power to such an extent that it should theoretically be able to satisfy the power requirement on any day that provides sufficient sunshine and wind. However, since sun and wind are often lacking ” Anyone with half a brain would know this was going to happen. How intelligent people can wildly rush down a road with so many pitfalls is beyond me. And as far as establishing the 50Hz frequency, that is usually anchored by your largest base loaded generator, most like a coal or nuclear steam plant. If none of those units are on line, none of the wind or solar units are big enough to keep the system in line. Where are the electrical engineers who know what the problems will be when you push it this far? Reading the article it was one major problem after another that was not adequately thought through.
Yeah, the energy price doubled in the last 18 years from 0,14 € kWh to 0,30 € kWh in Germany. Last year 344.000 households couldn’t pay their energy bill and their energy was turned off. The mass media still propagates this climate alarmism and brainwashes the people to pay co2 taxes and subsides.
“Last year 344.000 households couldn’t pay their energy bill and their energy was turned off.”
Maybe the government should tell them to keep warm in yellow vests.