Solar Subsidy Sinkhole: Re-Evaluating Germany's Blind Faith in the Sun

[wtmusic]

"The Baedeker travel guide is now available in an environmentally-friendly version. The 200-page book, entitled "Germany - Discover Renewable Energy," lists the sights of the solar age: the solar café in Kirchzarten, the solar golf course in Bad Saulgau, the light tower in Solingen and the "Alster Sun" in Hamburg, possibly the largest solar boat in the world.

The only thing that's missing at the moment is sunshine. For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no electricity. The days are short, the weather is bad and the sky is overcast.

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The RWI also expects the green energy surcharge on electricity bills to go up again soon. It is currently 3.59 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity, a number the German government had actually pledged to cap at 3.5 cents. But because of the most recent developments, RWI expert Frondel predicts that the surcharge will soon increase to 4.7 cents per kilowatt hour. For the average family, this would amount to an additional charge of about €200 a year, in addition to the actual cost of electricity. Solar energy has the potential to become the most expensive mistake in German environmental policy. Berlin energy economist Georg Erdmann, a member of the monitoring group on the energy transition appointed by Chancellor Merkel, views the expansion of solar energy as a threat to the planned nuclear phase-out."

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,809439,00.html

[jpak]

1. Germany ditched their nukes - the Sinkhole won

yup

[wtmusic]

2. The sinkhole won, Germans lost.

Yup

[mzteris]

14. you know the old adage

don't put all your eggs in one basket. . .

There's more to alternative energy than solar. . .

geothermal for instance, wind, biomass, water . . . and some we probably haven't even researched yet.

[Kolesar]

3. 3.5 cents/kWh is way less than the 6 cents Ohioans are paying for "stranded" costs of three nukes

Ohio tried to "deregulate" electricity. Consumers would have choices of other generators, but First Energy customers were stuck with a 6 cent/kW*hour charge on any electricity that we bought from any supplier.

The stranded costs were from the huge debts incurred to build Beaver Valley, Perry and the plant we always talk about: Davis Besse.

[Starboard Tack]

4. The only thing missing is sunshine - right now, because it's winter.

I think the Germans are smart enough to know that. They'll figure it out by exploiting more wind power and other renewable sources.

[Yo_Mama]

5. First, they would have to build the transmission infrastructure

Really this argument is about wind vs. solar, and in most of Germany, wind is much better.

Because they have already allocated over 22 billion Euros a year to solar subsidies (each year, it runs 20 years), they find themselves not funding the needed grid do-over to be able to use the northern wind in the country.

So now they can't exploit wind and the solar isn't doing much for them.

The Germans haven't figured it out. They are effing up big time.

The original argument for solar power was that it would generate jobs and it would avoid the need to upgrade the transmission grid to deal with the wind absorption problems. But it turns out it was no solution at all.

They also have regulatory problems galore, including lawsuits over most of the transmission capacity they are trying to build. But when you flub connecting up your wind farms, and when your neighbors are threatening to blockade the power surges from those wind farms, and when it's winter and that's when you really need the power, things start looking pretty bleak.

[Maslo55]

6. ...

Indeed. There was an article in a local newspaper here in Slovakia about electric grid managers complaining about electricity from german grid becoming harder to manage. If they want more wind and solar, grid overhaul with smartgrids and increase in storage to smooth out the output is a must for the future. Unstable grid can wreak havoc on many sensitive appliances.

[SpoonFed]

7. Not surprising to me that...

that you're trying to insert sideways through anecdote the usual nuke pundit talking point that a solar/wind backed grid is inferior, hard to manage and a source of problems.

Yeah... "electric grid managers" complaining.... yeah...

"havoc on appliances"...

[XemaSab]

8. Funny that my former colleague

who designed large rooftop solar installations for a living said the same thing.

I never would have thought that he was a shill for big nuke.

[SpoonFed]

15. No thanks for another annecdote.

I know where you stand on most issues XemaSab, don't need more information.
Been hanging around long enough to know which side of the nuke power vs renewables you stand on.

[XemaSab]

16. You're welcome!

[wtmusic]

9. Y'know, sometimes the truth just sucks....

but it's always better than sticking to something you want to believe that's wrong:

"The 15 mile-per-hour winds that buffeted northern Germany on July 24 caused the nation’s 21,600 windmills to generate so much power that utilities such as EON AG and RWE AG (RWE) had to pay consumers to take it off the grid.

Rather than an anomaly, the event marked the 31st hour this year when power companies lost money on their electricity in the intraday market because of a torrent of supply from wind and solar parks. The phenomenon was unheard of five years ago.

With Europe’s wind and solar farms set to triple by 2020, utilities investing in new coal and gas-fired power stations no longer face stable returns. As more renewables come on line, a gas plant owned by RWE or EON that may cost $1 billion to build will be stopped more often from running at full capacity. It may only pay for itself on days like Jan. 31, when clouds and still weather pushed an hour of power on the same-day market above 162 ($220) euros a megawatt-hour after dusk, in peak demand time."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/utilities-giving-away-power-as-wind-sun-flood-european-grid.html

[Yo_Mama]

10. It is not a talking point

It is a real problem. The problem for Germany right now is not so much the intermittent character of solar/wind, but that they do not have the infrastructure built to route the power to the places that could use it.

Here's an article in the Germany Energy Blog:
http://www.germanenergyblog.de/?p=8491

The following trilateral meeting between Czech, German and Polish representatives then focused (again) on unscheduled loop flows into the Czech and Polish grids caused by wind farms in Northern Germany.

Recently, CEPS, the Czech transmission system operator, warned that the Czech transmission system had been repeatedly and increasingly loaded with unscheduled north-south power flows in the last year that jeopardized network security. The company named excessive power output from wind parks in northern Germany, the shutdown of eight German nuclear power plants in the wake of Germany’s energy policy shift and the increase of installed capacity in photovoltaic power plants in Germany as some of the most important causes for the flows.

What's not cited in this post is that both the Poles and the Czechs are considering installing special transformers that can block the flows of electricity. They don't want to do it - it would be an additional expense for them. But they may have to do it.

Also on this forum I believe we have discussed both the failure to connect some of the northern wind farms and the failure to proceed with the north-south transmission hookups.

NO power plant works if you don't have the infrastructure in place to route the power. It is more expensive to design an extremely adaptive grid over hundreds of miles, but the Germans intend to do it. They have not done it, and some of the projects are blocked due to local suits.

[Kolesar]

11. No blackouts, no hardware damage, ..

Your "blog" cites an engineering and business challenge. It is hardly a refutation of renewable energy.

[Yo_Mama]

13. Exactly

But as for hardware failures, believe me they are in there.

To return to the point of the original post, the Germans are trying to figure out how to fund the upgrade of the electrical grid which they will need to do.

So far, they have invested a great deal in solar subsidies. They are not getting much bang for the buck at this point, and they probably will have to cut back on new solar subsidies and do the grid work first, then the storage. Their internal legal problems are an obstacle, but so is funding.

In no sense are the German problems a refutation of renewable energy. However they do address the cost - Germans were pretending that they didn't have to make these investments, and they do. Now they have to figure out how to fund it.

Solar power in much of Germany is problematic just because of Germany's location. You can't compare solar output in Germany to solar output in Spain. The only two reasons why Germans opted for the solar route in the first place are that there was strong local political support for it, because they thought they'd get the jobs. Well, the Chinese have taken over. They have no hope of competing. The second reason why they did this is that they had already realized it was going to cost a lot to really go much further with wind, due to the massive infrastructure improvements and the energy storage required.

They'd better decide to do the grid work quick before the companies abandon those North Sea projects. They have screwed those companies big time.

[SpoonFed]

17. Ja, ja...

dieenglischwörter.de ist nicht eine falsche pro-Atomkatastrophe Energie Blog.
Richtig.

It has the word german in its domain name, so it must be true!

[Yo_Mama]

12. Intermittent power does blow up some appliances

One of the things I always do for businesses when putting in any computer system is to ask about their power flows locally and then slap a monitor on to look at voltage fluctuations coming into the building.

If the power fluctuates much (which often happens even in businesses located near a large building like school), I either have them install a power conditioner on the building or I install UPS on all equipment. Equipment that will last for ten years on smooth power will often fail in 2-3 years in bad power situations, and there are other reliability issues that occur long before equipment failure.

And because most businesses don't know what their power situation really is, I always make a list of their major equipment and ask how long it is since the stuff has been installed and if they have had a lot of failures. Sometimes the fluctuations are seasonal and a short period of monitoring will look okay, but over the year they'll be in trouble.

In particular, strong fluctuations in power will destroy some refrigeration/AC units. Anything with a motor that ramps up and down can potentially be destroyed by power fluctuations. Electronics are impaired similarly. The MTBF of electronics is mostly determined by power phase and down cycles. Better quality electronic appliances will have power conditioners within the equipment to handle the fluctuations, but they only work within certain parameters.

[SpoonFed]

18. Non-sense.

Maybe it works for selling your clients more UPS or back-up generators but your analogy of bad building power to bad grid power is ridiculous. You're talking to the wrong guy if you think your anecdotal statements about "smooth power" vs "2-3 years" failure are anything but unsubstantiated, unscientific and unmathematical hot air.

Equipment that fails early due to loss of power is just shitty equipment. (Take nuclear reactors as a disgusting example of this point).

If you've got sensitive equipment (notice I didn't say appliances because the word appliances in this context is supposed to make consumers flinch with thoughts of their new fridge blowing up), and you are relying on the grid for good power at all times, it is a ridiculous proposition given any source, so the point you're trying to draw between crappy equipment and a "faulty, unreliable" renewable grid premise is just horseshit.

Shitty power distribution damages shitty equipment, news at eleven.
What does this have to do with Germany except the unproven proposition that the German grid is shitty,
and the follow up that it is shitty because of their choice of power sources.

Sorry, I'm not buying it. I'm glad I spent the money on the high end rational filters.

[Nihil]

19. Methinks the little sock-puppet needs to wash his mouth out with soap ...

Considering that you post little other than "anecdotal statements", it's a bit
rich for you to adopt the language style of one of the antagonists of your
other hand.

[XemaSab]

20. You left out ad hominem attacks

[Maslo55]

21. whats your experience

with unstable grids? Have you ever been in countries which suffer from low-quality grid electricity?

Its not ridiculous to rely on grid for good power, that should be our goal. And the talk is about voltage fluctuations when the power is on, not about planned outages.

If germans want to increase renewable energy beyond some fraction of the grid, they NEED to invest in smart grids and storage, thats just physical fact. Otherwise quality of the power will suffer, and environment with it (equipment that will last 10 years will last just 3 years, which is a waste of resources).
These expenses need to be included in the renewable energy transition plan.