10 ms·

Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables

41 points by bootload 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago
> Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid, on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negative—in other words, operators of large plants, most of which run on coal or natural gas, must pay commercial customers to consume electricity. Sounds like they need to encourage EV acquisition so that the extra supply of energy can go to EVs, while the pollution is reduced by taking diesel and petrol cars off the roads. They could also make use of batteries for storage so they can retire coal plants and better handle the variability of energy use. > The auction system is designed to reduce the rate of new renewable-energy additions and keep Germany from producing too much power. It might seem like an easy way to solve the oversupply issue would be to shut down excess power plants, especially ones that burn coal. But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Because German law requires renewable energy to be used first on the German grid, when Germany exports excess electricity to its European neighbors it primarily comes from coal plants. Last fall, the German subsidiary of the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall started up a 1,600-megwatt coal-fired plant that had been under construction for eight years, defying opposition from politicians, environmental organizations, and citizens who want to see coal plants eliminated. Okay, that's just stupid. This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Anything else seems to be a political problem, not a technical one.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  > This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Easily? The engineering challenges in doing this at utility scale are formidable.
aianus 10y ago
Why would they phase out nuclear before coal??
- rhino369 10y ago
  The Fukushima scare. Germany decided to go nuclear free afterward.
  - aianus 10y ago
    That's very short-sighted and reactionary. Shame on them. What about the every-other-day Beijing/Shanghai smog scare?
    - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
      And what about the 20,000 people killed in coal mining accidents every year[0]? What about the 130 million tonnes[1] of radioactive waste[2] produced by coal plants annually? Why are we still building a new coal power plant every other week[3]? [0]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235... [1]https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics [2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... [3]http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutters-coal-plants-china-and-japan-are-building-them/ http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...
    - jj89 10y ago
      Welcome to germany, land of the green and people who consider their morality to be superior. We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe. We pay money to our neighbours so they take away our surplus of energy at peaks and push the energy distribution to the limits which results in instabilities. Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years just because of the extremely high energy standards home builders have to adhere too (insulation, stupid energy exchangers et. al) And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.
      - 10y ago
astrodust 10y ago
The problem here is not renewable energy sources, it's buffering their output. Improvements to battery technology and short-term energy storage are key to cracking this problem. If energy is free or even profitable to consume you'd make money pumping water uphill during the day and using that potential energy later to produce power through conventional hydro-electric means. This is completely insane if you have to pay for power at conventional rates, but we're entering a new era where time of day costs might go all over the place without arbitrage like this to even things out.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  At least one of the early large scale pumped storage plants[1] was financed by power companies to optimize their internal costs. So it's long been the case that time arbitrage is a good idea for power production. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
  - DennisP 10y ago
    Pumped storage is a very cheap way to store energy, but unfortunately its scale is limited by geography. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...
- SquirrelOnFire 10y ago
  There are some rather clever and simple options for energy storage - like sending an electrically driven train up a few miles of inclined track - http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a14956/forget-batteries-store-energy-in-trains/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1... That said, for reliable baseline energy, you're not going to beat nuclear for a while. Modern nuclear "waste" is usable as fuel in Breeder type reactors (LFTR, Traveling Wave reactors) and the waste from those is containable with modern technology.
  - nickbauman 10y ago
ZeroGravitas 10y ago
People really get freaked out by negative prices. Even MIT outlets don't bother to explain why this is a bad thing, just stating that a price is negative is enough to demonstrate there's a problem.
- SFJulie 10y ago
  Negative prices means the market is heavily subsidized, hence non competitive hence non sustainable. Transforming renewable energy in electricity is anyway pretty ... stupid (lot of loss) and counter productive (handling surge, storing, grid complexification, poor capacity planning that requires even more fossil energy in high power mode to adapt to peak in demand) The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid. Right now, renewable energy is a big scam that can not sustain and that is used by thieves to still tax money in the name of good intentions.
  - outworlder 10y ago
    > The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid. What are you even talking about? Have you invented a new mechanic energy transmission process with no losses? If we are calling names, I'd say that mechanic energy transmission is even more "stupid". If your mechanic energy collection gizmo is not right where you want it, then you'll have tremendous losses transmitting it. Not that it matters too much in case of renewables. You just need a bigger collecting system. Also, electric energy is fungible. You can convert it into almost anything you need, including mechanical power. Good luck posting to hacker news with your mechanical energy. The solution is not going back to medieval era. It is to figure out better solutions. Renewable energy is not a scam. The market may be heavily subsidized (not everywhere), but that's how you jump-start an industry. Market forces may prevent development, but that's a different problem. Not to mention that everything is subsidized in some way. Coal power plants should be paying for the pollutants (including radiation) that they are releasing in the atmosphere. In fact, all current power plants (including hydro) are subsidized. If not by money directly, by the law.
jj89 10y ago
Our energy policy is a disaster. Anyone telling you something else is trying to sell you something. We have decades of high spending (contractual obligations) ahead of us, spending unbelievable amounts of money (see my other post). The low hanging fruits have been picked (roofs facing south, areas with much wind ...) yet we cover only one single percent of our energy usage by renewables. The energy policy is only one example of our total misbehaviour. In ten years we will face multiple existential crises because of our current policies. It feels bad to see so much money in so many areas being wasted.
- nisa 10y ago
  Really? This looks vastly different and has real data (click on all sources on the left side): https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Look at his post history, he only posts about how German Energy policy supposedly doesn’t work, and lies about facts to accomplish that. In other words, he’s a troll.
- Retric 10y ago
  Most countries are well over 1% renewables. Where are you talking about? EX: US 13%, Germany 30%. (Home solar power not necessarily counted in these numbers.)
merb 10y ago
What we (Germany) did was a joke. There are just soo many factors why the 'Energiewende' failed. It's because of the politics made. Eventually we would've running green already but once in a while Angela Merkel just stops a already running process, but then Fukushima happened and she made the decision to go 'all in' into green. But! She didn't actually. Most 'bigger' companies didn't even pay a cent more for the green energy, only the consumers or the main pillar (our middle industry) needed to pay the 'Energiewende'. That was freaking akward since the bigger Companies would've probably paid the biggest pillar of the 'Energiewende'. The next part is storing energy or producing energy by yourself. Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well. While maybe a lot of people can live with that, there was another thing, which is that building energy plants is regulated by our government. If you maybe are a rich guy and want to do something good, you can't since the plants are going through a really painful and akward regulation like a planned economy. Innovation won't win here since the government won't ever shutdown the last coal power plants since there is so much lobby going on when it comes to energy that even if you have a good idea how to solve the last problems (i.e. by innovating into battery grids or some other stuff) you won't succeed. The german government has their own plan, even when they need to raise taxes for all the consumers, they don't even care what happens with the prices on the market since the german consumer market is totally regulated.
- outworlder 10y ago
  > Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well. So, they own the sun now? Ridiculous.
  - thesumofall 10y ago
    You pay taxes on the income that you make when you sell your power "into" the grid, which makes sense as you're acting in a similar role as the utilities.
  - 10y ago
lispm 10y ago
The article is mostly misleading. > In fact, Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar. Germany did much more than that. But: the purpose of the Energiewende was not to reduce carbon emissions first. The purpose was to get rid of the nuclear power plants asap. Phasing out coal is the next goal. Getting rid of nuclear had several advantages (for example one can stop early investing even more billions into a failed and costly technology. Nuclear is only provided by large monopolistic utilities, which had to get out of the way. The Energiewende is as much an experiment in getting a much more diverse landscape of energy producers and opening up the huge monopolies for competition from companies of all sizes). Getting rid of coal is also politically difficult, since coal production and usage has a long tradition in Germany and it employed a lot of people and local politicians block closing coal production where they can. But the coal phase out is already starting. So already the description of the goal of the Energiewende is wrong. > And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal. "Is phasing out." But hasn't yet. There are several nuclear power plants running. > The country is now the world’s largest solar market. Germany’s carbon emissions in 2014 were 27 percent lower than 1990 levels. Which is already basically half from US carbon emissions per capita. > Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid, Actually fossil fuel plants can. But those who can are not profitable currently. > on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negativ That's because there is not enough grid capacity to transport the electricity to South Germany. The grid is being expanded to do so, but this is taking time. > Germany’s Parliament is expected to soon eliminate the government-set subsidy for renewable energy, known as a feed-in tariff, that has largely fueled the growth in wind and solar. It is expected that local government in Germany will block this. > But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Actually coal power plants in Germany are no longer lucrative and many many of them are losing money. Energy companies are threatening to close those. The mentioned Vattenfall coal power plant is a dinosaur planned long ago. It doesn't fit into the current energy landscape and is a very costly investment which looks like a huge failure. Doesn't look like the author did its homework...
ArkyBeagle 10y ago
Congratulations on getting rid of nuclear. So coal? Or gas? One's (much) filthier than nuclear ( but without the 1950s sci fi horror movie aroma ), the other belongs to Vladimir Putin. Enjoy. Now don't say fracking,, don't say fracking, don't say fracking....

41 points by bootload 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

> Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid, on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negative—in other words, operators of large plants, most of which run on coal or natural gas, must pay commercial customers to consume electricity. Sounds like they need to encourage EV acquisition so that the extra supply of energy can go to EVs, while the pollution is reduced by taking diesel and petrol cars off the roads. They could also make use of batteries for storage so they can retire coal plants and better handle the variability of energy use. > The auction system is designed to reduce the rate of new renewable-energy additions and keep Germany from producing too much power. It might seem like an easy way to solve the oversupply issue would be to shut down excess power plants, especially ones that burn coal. But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Because German law requires renewable energy to be used first on the German grid, when Germany exports excess electricity to its European neighbors it primarily comes from coal plants. Last fall, the German subsidiary of the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall started up a 1,600-megwatt coal-fired plant that had been under construction for eight years, defying opposition from politicians, environmental organizations, and citizens who want to see coal plants eliminated. Okay, that's just stupid. This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Anything else seems to be a political problem, not a technical one.

jacquesm 10y ago
> This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Easily? The engineering challenges in doing this at utility scale are formidable.

aianus 10y ago

Why would they phase out nuclear before coal??

rhino369 10y ago
The Fukushima scare. Germany decided to go nuclear free afterward.
- aianus 10y ago
  That's very short-sighted and reactionary. Shame on them. What about the every-other-day Beijing/Shanghai smog scare?
  - thescriptkiddie 10y ago
    And what about the 20,000 people killed in coal mining accidents every year[0]? What about the 130 million tonnes[1] of radioactive waste[2] produced by coal plants annually? Why are we still building a new coal power plant every other week[3]? [0]http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235,00.html http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1595235... [1]https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics https://www.epa.gov/coalash/coal-ash-basics [2]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-r... [3]http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutters-coal-plants-china-and-japan-are-building-them/ http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/as-u-s-shutte...
  - jj89 10y ago
    Welcome to germany, land of the green and people who consider their morality to be superior. We spend $25bn/year to produce 1% of our energy usage by renewables. We shut down our mostly modern atom reactors to burn more coal. We now spend ~30 dollar cent per kilowatt hour to have much dirtier energy than most of the rest of europe. We pay money to our neighbours so they take away our surplus of energy at peaks and push the energy distribution to the limits which results in instabilities. Newbuild house prices have increased by 40% in the last ten years just because of the extremely high energy standards home builders have to adhere too (insulation, stupid energy exchangers et. al) And all the while we are the only sane people in our own eyes.
    - 10y ago

astrodust 10y ago

The problem here is not renewable energy sources, it's buffering their output. Improvements to battery technology and short-term energy storage are key to cracking this problem. If energy is free or even profitable to consume you'd make money pumping water uphill during the day and using that potential energy later to produce power through conventional hydro-electric means. This is completely insane if you have to pay for power at conventional rates, but we're entering a new era where time of day costs might go all over the place without arbitrage like this to even things out.

maxerickson 10y ago
At least one of the early large scale pumped storage plants[1] was financed by power companies to optimize their internal costs. So it's long been the case that time arbitrage is a good idea for power production. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...
- DennisP 10y ago
  Pumped storage is a very cheap way to store energy, but unfortunately its scale is limited by geography. http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/11/pump-up-the-stor...
SquirrelOnFire 10y ago
There are some rather clever and simple options for energy storage - like sending an electrically driven train up a few miles of inclined track - http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a14956/forget-batteries-store-energy-in-trains/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1... That said, for reliable baseline energy, you're not going to beat nuclear for a while. Modern nuclear "waste" is usable as fuel in Breeder type reactors (LFTR, Traveling Wave reactors) and the waste from those is containable with modern technology.
- nickbauman 10y ago

ZeroGravitas 10y ago

People really get freaked out by negative prices. Even MIT outlets don't bother to explain why this is a bad thing, just stating that a price is negative is enough to demonstrate there's a problem.

SFJulie 10y ago
Negative prices means the market is heavily subsidized, hence non competitive hence non sustainable. Transforming renewable energy in electricity is anyway pretty ... stupid (lot of loss) and counter productive (handling surge, storing, grid complexification, poor capacity planning that requires even more fossil energy in high power mode to adapt to peak in demand) The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid. Right now, renewable energy is a big scam that can not sustain and that is used by thieves to still tax money in the name of good intentions.
- outworlder 10y ago
  > The real solution maybe to adapt our lives to the seasonality, and maybe to use wind power ... well to make wind mill for instance. Mechanic to mechanic energy transformation is not stupid. What are you even talking about? Have you invented a new mechanic energy transmission process with no losses? If we are calling names, I'd say that mechanic energy transmission is even more "stupid". If your mechanic energy collection gizmo is not right where you want it, then you'll have tremendous losses transmitting it. Not that it matters too much in case of renewables. You just need a bigger collecting system. Also, electric energy is fungible. You can convert it into almost anything you need, including mechanical power. Good luck posting to hacker news with your mechanical energy. The solution is not going back to medieval era. It is to figure out better solutions. Renewable energy is not a scam. The market may be heavily subsidized (not everywhere), but that's how you jump-start an industry. Market forces may prevent development, but that's a different problem. Not to mention that everything is subsidized in some way. Coal power plants should be paying for the pollutants (including radiation) that they are releasing in the atmosphere. In fact, all current power plants (including hydro) are subsidized. If not by money directly, by the law.

jj89 10y ago

Our energy policy is a disaster. Anyone telling you something else is trying to sell you something. We have decades of high spending (contractual obligations) ahead of us, spending unbelievable amounts of money (see my other post). The low hanging fruits have been picked (roofs facing south, areas with much wind ...) yet we cover only one single percent of our energy usage by renewables. The energy policy is only one example of our total misbehaviour. In ten years we will face multiple existential crises because of our current policies. It feels bad to see so much money in so many areas being wasted.

nisa 10y ago
Really? This looks vastly different and has real data (click on all sources on the left side): https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
- kuschku 10y ago
  Look at his post history, he only posts about how German Energy policy supposedly doesn’t work, and lies about facts to accomplish that. In other words, he’s a troll.
Retric 10y ago
Most countries are well over 1% renewables. Where are you talking about? EX: US 13%, Germany 30%. (Home solar power not necessarily counted in these numbers.)

merb 10y ago

What we (Germany) did was a joke. There are just soo many factors why the 'Energiewende' failed. It's because of the politics made. Eventually we would've running green already but once in a while Angela Merkel just stops a already running process, but then Fukushima happened and she made the decision to go 'all in' into green. But! She didn't actually. Most 'bigger' companies didn't even pay a cent more for the green energy, only the consumers or the main pillar (our middle industry) needed to pay the 'Energiewende'. That was freaking akward since the bigger Companies would've probably paid the biggest pillar of the 'Energiewende'. The next part is storing energy or producing energy by yourself. Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well. While maybe a lot of people can live with that, there was another thing, which is that building energy plants is regulated by our government. If you maybe are a rich guy and want to do something good, you can't since the plants are going through a really painful and akward regulation like a planned economy. Innovation won't win here since the government won't ever shutdown the last coal power plants since there is so much lobby going on when it comes to energy that even if you have a good idea how to solve the last problems (i.e. by innovating into battery grids or some other stuff) you won't succeed. The german government has their own plan, even when they need to raise taxes for all the consumers, they don't even care what happens with the prices on the market since the german consumer market is totally regulated.

outworlder 10y ago
> Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well. So, they own the sun now? Ridiculous.
- thesumofall 10y ago
  You pay taxes on the income that you make when you sell your power "into" the grid, which makes sense as you're acting in a similar role as the utilities.
- 10y ago

lispm 10y ago

The article is mostly misleading. > In fact, Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar. Germany did much more than that. But: the purpose of the Energiewende was not to reduce carbon emissions first. The purpose was to get rid of the nuclear power plants asap. Phasing out coal is the next goal. Getting rid of nuclear had several advantages (for example one can stop early investing even more billions into a failed and costly technology. Nuclear is only provided by large monopolistic utilities, which had to get out of the way. The Energiewende is as much an experiment in getting a much more diverse landscape of energy producers and opening up the huge monopolies for competition from companies of all sizes). Getting rid of coal is also politically difficult, since coal production and usage has a long tradition in Germany and it employed a lot of people and local politicians block closing coal production where they can. But the coal phase out is already starting. So already the description of the goal of the Energiewende is wrong. > And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal. "Is phasing out." But hasn't yet. There are several nuclear power plants running. > The country is now the world’s largest solar market. Germany’s carbon emissions in 2014 were 27 percent lower than 1990 levels. Which is already basically half from US carbon emissions per capita. > Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid, Actually fossil fuel plants can. But those who can are not profitable currently. > on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negativ That's because there is not enough grid capacity to transport the electricity to South Germany. The grid is being expanded to do so, but this is taking time. > Germany’s Parliament is expected to soon eliminate the government-set subsidy for renewable energy, known as a feed-in tariff, that has largely fueled the growth in wind and solar. It is expected that local government in Germany will block this. > But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Actually coal power plants in Germany are no longer lucrative and many many of them are losing money. Energy companies are threatening to close those. The mentioned Vattenfall coal power plant is a dinosaur planned long ago. It doesn't fit into the current energy landscape and is a very costly investment which looks like a huge failure. Doesn't look like the author did its homework...

ArkyBeagle 10y ago

Congratulations on getting rid of nuclear. So coal? Or gas? One's (much) filthier than nuclear ( but without the 1950s sci fi horror movie aroma ), the other belongs to Vladimir Putin. Enjoy. Now don't say fracking,, don't say fracking, don't say fracking....