By P Gosselin
Two brief periods of wind doldrums and Germany’s power supply reaches its limits …
German Chemical Industry Association: “It’s desperate.”
By Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt
From November 2 to November 8 and from December 10 to December 13, Germany’s electricity supply from renewable energies collapsed as a typical winter weather situation with a lull in the wind and minimal solar irradiation led to supply shortages, high electricity imports and skyrocketing electricity prices.
At times, over 20,000 MW, more than a quarter of Germany’s electricity requirements, had to be imported. Electricity prices rose tenfold (93.6 €ct/kWh). Companies that did not have long-term contracts had to cease production. Wolfgang Große Entrup, Managing Director of the German Chemical Industry Association (VCI): “It’s desperate. Our companies and our country cannot afford fair-weather production. We urgently need power plants that can step in safely.”
The reason: The socialist/green led coalition government and the prior Merkel governments had decommissioned 19 nuclear power plants (30% of Germany’s electricity demand) and 15 coal-fired power plants were taken off the grid on April 1, 2023 alone. 4.35 billion euros of taxpayers’ money in decommissioning premiums were distributed to RWE and LEAG (East Germany). In January 2025, RWE’s Weisweiler power plant will go offline. This, of all months, will occur in January, when electricity consumption in Germany is at its highest and France may have little to supply. This is because France is the most heat-sensitive country in Europe and even small fluctuations in temperature can have an impact on electricity consumption due to the widespread use of electric heating systems. 1 degree Celsius less and consumption in France increases by 2400 megawatts!
But Germany’s misguided energy policy of switching off secure power is now also causing our neighbors to have economic difficulties. Southern Norway, southern Sweden, Austria and the Netherlands saw similarly high electricity prices as Germany did during the dark doldrums (see chart above, the figures are in €/MWh, to convert to €ct/kWh, you have to divide by 10).
Denmark, whose electricity supply is also based on wind power (56%), also exacerbated the malaise there by importing electricity from Scandinavia.
Norway’s energy minister in the center-left government, Terja Aasland, wants to cut the power cable to Denmark and renegotiate the electricity contracts with Germany. He is thus responding to the demands of the right-wing Progress Party, which has been calling for this for a long time and will probably win the next elections. According to the Progress Party, the price infection from the south must be stopped.
Swedish Energy Minister Ebba Busch was even clearer: “It is difficult for an industrial economy to rely on the benevolence of the weather gods for its prosperity.” And directly to Habeck’s green policy: “No political will is strong enough to override the laws of physics – not even Mr. Habeck’s.”
It is also often forgotten that wind turbines consume electricity when they are stationary or switched off. This is because all technical components (oil pumps, fans, control systems, etc.) must remain in operation even when they are still. Vestas specifies an electricity consumption of 55,000 kWh per year for a 4.2 MW turbine at standstill. During production times, the turbine supplies itself with electricity. But it is virtually idle 120 days a year.
If we assume an average self-consumption of 40,000 kWh per year for all German turbines, we arrive at 1.2 terawatt hours, the generation of a medium-sized gas-fired power plant To apply this to our dark, windless doldrums: to supply the wind turbines, a power plant with around 400 MW would have to run or the same output would have to be imported for days on end to prevent the wind turbines from going down.
Complete article at Klimanachrichten.
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Guest blogger, if you can show how subsidies for greenstuff can be increased while deindustrialising the economy to China etc AND maintaining living standards…
Tell Rachel Reeves and flywheel Miliband.
They’re trying to get through to them-
Experts reveal why Germany’s wind power could lead to rising bills
Wading through molasses…
This is what the Greens want, demand management is the fluffy label, rationing is the truth.
Until it happens to them.
Then we will all hear the whinging and whining from the other side of the world.
And they will blame it on coal !! 😉
The Germans just did not weatherize their wind turbines right, or something. That was the party line for the renewables lobby in Texas in February 2021.
Next time we’ll do it right?
Ruling classes never go short, especially in socialist states.
Good thing I’m not in charge of the Australian NEM.
I would target those electorates that voted Green, Teal and Labor as the first to experience “demand management”
It’s mind boggling to think that people who are in charge of countries can be so absolutely thick as bricks. Or is it deliberate?
It’s mind boggling and it is entirely deliberate.
Miliband will pipe us all to the green new Jerusalem
It’s deliberate. Problem, reaction, solution. Same as it ever was.
Yet the people who make these decisions all become stinking rich once they leave through chairmanships/directorships/consultancies in industries they do not understand, book deals that few people buy and speeches of very little interest. It’s as if they are well paid by grateful profiteers.
There’s little to be made from striking a good bargain for your countrymen.
If they are incapable of running a country, why would anyone let them try to run a company?
You only need to look at the incompetence on many a corporate board nowadays to answer that question.
It has to do with total innumeracy and a lack of critical thinking. Logic is an option, rarely used.
Too bad they never show Russia’s energy prices. Same gas…
I don’t remember the laws of physics changing, the situation is the same as 20 years ago. If the laws of physics say no today, then they said no 20 years ago and will say no 20 years in the future. That’s the real tragedy, everyone knew.
#BigGreenKnew
This chart illustrates how German bids pushed up power prices in Norway in the Oslo region on 12th December. No wonder the Norwegians want to cut the interconnector.
Here’s the corresponding supply picture when prices peaked.
Here’s a map of the interconnector flows at the peak hour. Note that the UK was importing from Norway and re-exporting to Denmark (1.4GW), effectively providing an additional route for Norwegian power into Germany.
Everybody clipping the ticket on its way through to Germany.
It’s not that the interconnects need to be eliminated, it’s that they need to be better managed.
Only sell the excess power. If there is no excess power available, cut the ties.
I don’t think that’s really a solution either. With renewables you get excess power at both ends of the interconnector when it’s windy or sunny. Who gets to export? The price is likely to be very low or negative, and likely consumers in the exporting country will be paying for subsidies on the exported quantities. National Grid payed Dutch solar farms €500/MWh to curtail rather than force export on BritNed. Much better to limit the export capacity so that there is better incentive to align generation with demand.
It can be reasonable to have some interconnection to support e.g. for plant outages for maintenance – that’s the principle of the grid in the first place. Perhaps where there is a clear agreement to share a major power resource – e.g. Iguacu Falls hydro, or perhaps French nuclear from Gravelines feeding IFA1. I still think there was no good excuse for building BritNed to coal fired MPP3 that feeds it from Maasvlakte, Rotterdam rather than going ahead with Kingsnorth D coal fired power station, just to keep greens like Zac Goldsmith (who led the protests) happy.
Will someone in a position to do so please point all this out toi Ed Milliband the next time he waffles on about energy security and escaping the volatility of world markets.
He will say words to the effect: “This is the worst of it; we will emerge on the sunny uplands once we have enough wind and solar. Have faith. Stay the course.”
So, by my calculations, a non-generating wind turbine consumes 6.28 kilowatt hours per hour, which equals over 150 kilowatt hours per day! Multiply that by thousands of turbines and you’re into megawatt hours per day! For the UK, that could be a significant percentage of national consumption on a day when the turbines aren’t working… You couldn’t make it up!
I have seen/heard it said that wind turbines never pay back the carbon cost of fabrication, installation and repair etc. over their lifetime.
it would be really good to see an authoritative report into this aspect. The “idle power consumption” would be a part of that equation.
A short google search doesn’t quantify the so-called “negligible” amount of electricity consumption when the wind speed drops under the minimum speed to produce electricity. In other words, do you have a link for your claim of 6.28 kwh per hour?
I quote from the article, Steve:- “Vestas specifies an electricity consumption of 55,000 kWh per year for a 4.2 MW turbine at standstill” then did the mathematics to get an hourly rate.
This should be the take away for everyone. “This is because all technical components (oil pumps, fans, control systems, etc.) must remain in operation even when they are still. Vestas specifies an electricity consumption of 55,000 kWh per year for a 4.2 MW turbine at standstill. During production times, the turbine supplies itself with electricity. But it is virtually idle 120 days a year.”
Vestas say (via Google translate)
The self-consumption meter (recording the amount of electrical energy) only records the required amounts of energy when the wind turbine itself is not producing any electrical energy (downtime). No information can be given on the actual total electrical consumption of the wind turbine. This is mainly due to the fact that the energy required for auxiliary units during production times is covered by the wind turbine’s own energy generation. In this respect, the self-consumption depends largely on the amount of non-production times of the respective system. As a result, the self-consumption of a wind turbine at a location with strong winds is usually considerably lower than at a location with less wind. The self-consumption of a Vestas wind turbine is therefore subject to extremely strong fluctuations, which are influenced by various site-specific factors. These include, for example, site-specific, daily temperature fluctuations (diurnal variation of the ambient temperature) with the associated activities of the heating or cooling system; Shutdowns that are
necessary to meet approval requirements (e.g. shutdowns to protect against shadows and bats); but also possibly site-specific activities
of the azimuth system (wind direction tracking).
As a result, self-consumption values are very dependent on the location and can fluctuate extremely depending on the location and environmental conditions. This both in the direction of lower, but also higher consumption values.
The values given below for self-consumption of VESTAS wind turbines have been determined on the basis of measured data from the German fleet. The information represents the average grid consumption of the various system types and locations, including shutdowns due to approval requirements, and can therefore only be used for application purposes as part of the approval process.
The values given do not constitute any guarantee.
The document then quotes 48-55MWh per year for medium sized turbines which is a reasonably small share of total output. e.g a 5MW turbine at a low 20% average capacity factor produces 8760MWh per year. Offshore it might easily double that.
55 MwH per year would be a continuous load of 55000/8760=6.3 KW…about 8 HP…That’s pretty high, probably something wrong with the numbers, or includes blade defrosting load in frosty weather conditions. Lube oil standby heat is much lower than that.
You have blades that weigh tens of tonnes to rotate for anti-brinelling, and the whole turbine assembly for yaw correction.
https://www.wind-energy-the-facts.org/rotor-and-nacelle-mass.html
Doesn’t seem wholly unreasonable to me, especially if there is blade heating or generator/power electronics cooling.
So, they can’t generate enough power to sustain themselves without coal and gas fired electric generation. So elimination of wind and solar is the only solution, that and putting in prison for life all the anti-human scumbags who have and are perpetuating these crimes.
“But it is virtually idle 120 days a year.”
_______________________________________________________________________
Usually at night:
L.J.Timmerman Airport, Milwaukee, WI
and of course there’s this old tune
In the still of the night
A further thought: if things get so bad that the power companies have to start load-shedding (i.e. make selective power cuts) are the unproductive wind turbines kept supplied at the expense of domestic consumers?
Great point.!
Secret: most of the offshore ones have their own diesel generators to ensure that. In some cases they are located at the offshore substation platform. Usually no more than a few 10s of kW per turbine, sufficient to turn the blades very slowly to avoid brinelling and to rotate the hub so the cables inside the tower don’t get too twisted. Aviation lights must also be powered.
diesel generators! How dare they use a polluting fossil fuel! /s
… and to rotate the hub so the cables inside the tower don’t get too twisted…
________________________________________________________________
You mean the design of these things is that crappy?
Blame the design of the weather. As weather systems go through the turbine yaws to maintain alignment to wind direction. The result is that they end up doing 360s. They can usually tolerate up to 5 rotations before they must be unwound, but operations will typically unwind them any time winds are slight so as not to be fighting the wind. If it isn’t done the turbine has to be feathered and locked out rather than rip the cables.
How bout a design that doesn’t twist the cables or doesn’t use cables.
That would involve a commutator which would introduce resistance/losses and risk of arcing. Be sure that the engineers who design these things do try to work out what makes most sense.
Plus corrosion of the commutator surfaces.
Yes and I can remember my Dad taking the old 1950 Ford generator apart to shine up the commutator.
The nacelle is rotating very slow, so it could be a system where each power cable terminates in two plugs. Each plug can carry the full load. One of those two plugs can disconnect and move to another socket with no arcing. Sockets are arranged like spokes on a wheel. And three “Wheels” on the same vertical shaft for 3 phase power. The plugs would “walk” around the shaft as it rotates in either direction. Sort of like a “geneva mechanism”
I have this vision of the cables in the tower twisting like the rubber bands in a toy airplane. Hence my, “Crappy” comment.
Yes and there’s a lot of, “That’s how we’ve always done it, it works and were not gonna reinvent the wheel. And we have other things to do.”
They have moved on a bit from Dutch designs from a few centuries ago. There really has been a fair amount of development work in all sorts of areas to try to reduce cost and increase output and reliability. Not all of it successful, it has to be said. Design is now quite mature: costs seem no longer to be falling.
True enough, but this snark still applies:
Wind mills are a 14th century solution
to a 21st century non-problem.
Of course. That electricity is taken at the wind turbine before any power company sees any electricity.
The same happens at a regular power station: parasitic load for things like water pumps, lighting, fuel delivery/pulverisation systems for coal etc.
NOT CORRECT:
Stop using average capacity and nameplate maximums MW for wind, or solar!
Look at any hour of wind or solar and see if it has delivered every minute at nameplate MW. Odds are it has not.
Grid capacity is for a dependable, schedulable, stable full time capacity…like nuclear, coal, oil, natural gas.
Wind and solar vary every minute..with wind changes in speed or direction or clouds.
Any lower output for solar or wind is instantly made-up by RUNNING rotational generation.
As for energy output, perhaps look at nameplate MW-minutes / hour. (capacity at every minute in hour)…and compare wind/solar output to any dispatchable rotational generation output.
As a requirement for grid connection: all generators must “make-up” capacity deficiencies on site….before supplying to grid. A continuous energy requirement…and correct for AC voltage, and power factor.
Sporadic generation is a physical demand on the grid, and huge cost to taxpayers/customers.
Output is usually fairly stable once the wind is strong enough. Here’s the output if the Ararat wind farm in Victoria, Australia at 5 minute resolution over the past 24 hours.
So no actual MW available for grid demand. Only nature commanded output.
Grid must fill in gaps with RUNNING, dispatchable capacity/energy to “make-up” natural deficiencies. With costs that should be borne by sporadic, destabilizing, non-dispatchable generators.
ANY time zero or less than nameplate capacity in a year excludes all of nameplate capacity from necessary grid planning–for following loads.
FULL time electric service requires decades ahead planning, financing, building, to meet instant customer demands and allow for scheduled maintenance and occasional break-downs.
That is not how this engineer would define stable. It varies and fluctuates in real time.
For comparison here is Loy Yang A coal fired power station operating mainly in baseload mode, albeit with reduced output overnight.
The variations are based on load demands, not variations in clouds or wind.
The difference is clear. Load demand variations are not due to input variations.
I think if you had ever been in a plant control room you would know that no plant operates with perfect stability. There are always small fluctuations for one reason or another. Skilled operators pick up on those to anticipate the need for maintenance, or perhaps some problem with the plant feed etc.
The “nameplate” numbers on the backs of PV modules are dictated by electrical standards such as the National Electric Code in the US (Article 690). They are maximum values needed to calculate safety margins in system designs, and have little relation to production in actual use.
PV system designers go through a lot gyrations to convert them into ratings for an actual site, but are no guarantees of what future energy production will be.
Precisely.
A while ago I got some data about the German wind energy.. 5min data.
I organised it and did some calcs and a graph..
A couple of things readable for the chart
80% of the time, wind was below 30% of rated capacity
50% of the time, it was below about 15-16 % off capacity
(note: you have to subtract the “Percentage of time” from 100 to see these results)
Re the interconnectors and market issues. I recall the first gas interconnector being installed (I was a metering engineer for one of the large oil companies at the time) we had “skin in the game” ….
the marketing guys told me then – and it came to pass – that the mere fact of a pipeline would mean the market would do its thing with respect to price. No gas molecules actually had to flow in either direction to see this. I suspect the same is true of electrons and the power ICs.
Talk of low prices, energy independence and connection to the mainland grid is pretty much nonsense.
When one has a stable supply, then demand controls supply up to the point demand exceeds supply capabilities.
Within limiting constraints, you speculation is true. It is false when those constraints are exceeded.
Generally the “dead” of winter occurs around mid January, three weeks from now, and the following sixty days can be quite brutal at times. I guess we can all get our bags of popcorn and (assuming we don’t live in this morass) enjoy the show. Like an addict, sometimes you really have to hit rock bottom before a change can occur.
In the UK for the past few days the wind has been quite brisk and producing almost 60% of electricity demand at night with nuclear and gas making up most of the 40%. During the day the extra demand has been met by a very small amount of solar, imported electricity and the heavy lifting done by gas generation.
IIRC wind and solar cannot provide the inertia and frequency control of conventional power generators.
What level of conventional generation with its inertia do we need to provide a stable electricity supply?
If the number of wind generators increases as Milliband apparently is planning, how will the grid be kept stable? Will many of the turbines have to be switched off in periods of high wind to maintain stability? I hope they don’t get paid for the electricity they say they might have produced. In other industries a surplus of production causes lower prices and unsold products.
I see from the weather forecast that we are likely to have a dunkelflaute over the Christmas holiday. I hope we will have enough electricity to cook the turkey.
Will the wind farm operators pay for buying the electricity needed that they can’t produce?
Don’t forget the curtailment costs when the grid needs to be balanced. These costs have added £1bn to UK electricity bills over the last year.
“It is also often forgotten that wind turbines consume electricity when they are stationary or switched off.
Interesting- had no clue about that.
Easy to see, an array of turbines in good wind will all be spinning and pointing in the same direction. With little or no wind some will still turn slowly but as it’s due to wind they will be pointing in random directions.
They are still turning due to electricity supplied to the mechanism to keep it from binding or locking. This is a known design feature.
Our deeper history demonstrates a desire to produce efficient sources of energy which are both cost effective and efficient. In this regard coal, gas, hydro and nuclear have proven themselves many times over something that wind and solar will never do because their whole development history is back to front..
What we need to hear from the so called experts is why any economy needs expensive intermittent sources of energy which are many times dirtier than fossil fuel especially when they come to the end of their life. How much is that clean up operation going to cost and who is responsible and contracted to pay for it?
There is no such thing as clean green energy however you honestly look at it but at least some fuels do their jobs with minimum fuss which is why we use them on a large scale.
Miliband has history and is just another nasty dirty piece of work which makes you wonder how Britain’s main political parties manage to ever recruit these people. . .
No one with a clue would want to be in government these days. You are under intense scrutiny, in a sclerotic system, for a modest salary. If you are a demonstrable thicko but have a family history of politicking, governing may be your only hope. The partial-pressure of numbskulls is probably quite high in all the parties. It makes me wonder how they manage to avoid recruiting even more of the blighters.
Modest salary? That is not universal.
During the 1972-3 Three Day I was working in a factory which had several continuous processes that couldn’t be easily be stopped and restarted. Because of this power was maintained when there was a scheduled shut down. I am now wondering what our new government is going to do if blackouts are needed when the inevitable happens. Will they support industry?
Of course they will, until the credit markets say no.
No they won’t. Already seen in the large swathes of industry that have shut up and moved elsewhere. In fact, in many cases causing industry to close is part of the objective – it emits, you know!
During that period, Ben, I lived in a flat in Muswell Hill, London. It turned out that we were on the same feed as a nearby hospital so our lights never went out. We loved watching out of the window at “cut-off” time as all the surrounding houses went dark while ours didn’t! Happy days…
Muswell Hill! Lived down the road in East Finchley for many years. Fun fact:.Wetherspoons first pub was opened in Muswell Hill.Spent many enjoyable evenings there until another opened in East Finchley
All according to plan, the Marxists are grinning ear to ear. The question is ….. how much will the people put up with?
Germans blame the Russians for lack of wind
Colluding with Donnald Trump, as usual.
Is this intended to be sarcasm or do you believe what you posted?
Remember Jane Lubchenco’s idea for a National Climate Service?
She said the new service could provide information for citing wind farms,
“If you want to, for example, create a wind farm, you really want to know what the weather will be, what the wind patterns will be like the next 100 years, not what they’ve been like the last 100 years.”
Of course that was ludicrous. But that was Jane’s forte. Ludicrous idea and lying.
She has likely been the most dishonest science “expert” in history.
Her fabrication of human caused, Climate Change ocean “Dead Zones” is exhibit A.
Her NPR interview about her National Climate Service idea is here.
https://www.npr.org/2010/02/12/123651132/government-plans-national-climate-service
This tragedy is an education problem. The ‘deciders’ never learned to add, but they know how to subtract. AND, they know they will never be held to account for moronic choices.
Europe is not alone in this debacle, the weather for the late December and early January across much of the USA will be low wind and no sun – our dunkelflaute. Wind turbines will not produce, but will consume electricity, PV will lie uselessly on the ground.
BUT, remember that this lack of power is a secret in the minds of the ‘deciders’ there is plenty for themselves, and that is the important thing.
I read all the comments, even RGs, not a word from the usual suspects, Izaak, Warren, Nick and Rusty. I wonder why?
Following the near collapse of the Alberta grid last January when it dropped to -43 degrees C in Edmonton, I investigated how much power the ~1000 wind turbines use in electrical power to stay warm. The turbines are in a windy area but they shut down at -28 to -30 C due to gearbox temperature issues. (In hot weather they have an upper limit due to overheating.)
This power draw number was very difficult to obtain. It is not normally reported. I can say that it seems to be on the order of 150 kW each, not counting blade heating for de-icing which would have to be provided before re-starting.
If anyone has better information please post it here with a source.
I wrote to the local MPP and suggested that for producers that have a 100% guaranteed offtake contract (which is common for RE) they can have that, but when they disconnect from the grid during a supply emergency due to issues inherent in their design, they are not allowed to draw power from the grid as they wish. If their equipment needs to be heated while off, they must provide it as part of the technology package. They are not allowed to draw from the grid until power is available – spare – in order to heat the unit up to operating temperature and when weather permits operation.
People are more important than machines at -40 degrees. The grid operator was on the verge of implementing rotating power cuts while feeding ~150 MW into standing wind turbines. Electricity in the depths of winter is a life and death issue. Once a home water system freezes, it won’t thaw until spring. Forced air furnaces have electric fans. Home oxygen systems have compressors.
It happens that I live within 40 km of 2 coal-fired power plants that were shuttered, each of which has centuries of coal available. Meanwhile due to federal policies and carbon taxes, coal for heating has gone from $11/ton to $195/ton in a few short years.
An unusual set if circumstances, but ones that deserve a proper and unusual solution. Or perhaps a usual one – Alberta is after all well endowed with natural gas which works in ultra cold conditions.
This is insane, if Germany and Denmark want to slit their wrists that is their business, I don’t feel sorry for them. Why on earth would the rest of Europe force their citizens to sacrifice for Germany and Denmark’s ignorance?
Because Germany’s and Denmark’s ignorance is widely shared amongst other European governments.
The author reports:
It is also often forgotten that wind turbines consume electricity when they are stationary or switched off. This is because all technical components (oil pumps, fans, control systems, etc.) must remain in operation even when they are still. Vestas specifies an electricity consumption of 55,000 kWh per year for a 4.2 MW turbine at standstill. During production times, the turbine supplies itself with electricity. But it is virtually idle 120 days a year.
Comment: $5000/yr at $0.10/KWh. Pennies. But a turbine doesn’t sit idle, during lack of demand the turbine is rotated to relieve bearing stress from that heavy propeller out at the end of the main shaft, and the propeller needs that rotation to prevent warping from differential heating on the blades. Actual consumption is much higher. Is there one watt hour meter on one turbine anywhere in the world that’s recording this “interesting’ metric? I don’t think so. No wind farm should be without at least one turbine with a watthour meter for recording imported power.