14 ms·

I don't think that's true, for example renewables were responsible for ~50% of the energy generated in the UK in Q1 2020[0], and Germany claims it's ~40%[1] and

I don't think that's true, for example renewables were responsible for ~50% of the energy generated in the UK in Q1 2020[0], and Germany claims it's ~40%[1] and Sweden claims it's ~55%[2]. These aren't perfect numbers, but they clearly demonstrate renewable energy is deployable at national grid scale. [0]: https://www.edie.net/news/10/Renewables-accounted-for-record-47--of-UK-generation-in-first-quarter-of-2020 https://www.edie.net/news/10/Renewables-accounted-for-record... [1]: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... [2]: https://sweden.se/nature/energy-use-in-sweden/ https://sweden.se/nature/energy-use-in-sweden/

Akronymus 6y ago
The only problem I have with that, is that renewables can mostly only be treated as a bonus. Trying to rely on them for baseline power means you have to put out a LOT more capacity than you'd need with fossils. IMO baseline being nuclear and the rest being mostly renewables (With HEAVY reliance on pumped storage power plants, as a sort of capacitor) is the way to go to minimize emissions.
- acomjean 6y ago
  We have a solar array on the house. A lot of the Dc to AC solar inverters used in residential installs use the grid to match the frequency of the AC. The downside is with no grid power the solar system doesn’t work to power the house. There are systems that can but they’re more money.
  - cookieswumchorr 6y ago
    can you directly use the DC as a reserve source? like, install car plugs in the house? there are lots of smaller everyday electrical gear for this standard
    - extrapickles 6y ago
      That works for small cabins and lighting, as a 12v car outlet requires the same thickness of wire as a normal AC outlet. This is somewhat popular to do if you don’t need to use any high power appliances as then you can skip needing an inverter.
    - VBprogrammer 6y ago
      It's actually a much more interesting question than you might expect. Lots of modern appliances could run perfectly on DC of around the RMS voltage. For example the most modern fridges rectify the incoming mains to drive a brushless DC motor, this allows them to run at an appropriate speed rather than using bang bang control. Even an an induction hob, you might think it was most reliant on having an AC waveform but actually they need a much higher frequency so again they rectify the incoming mains. Obviously it's not quite that easy, for example an oven uses resistive heating elements which would work fine on DC, however, the relay in the control circuitry wouldn't be able to switch a DC voltage.
  - jacquesm 6y ago
    Transfer switch to a very small inverter run off a battery; add your loads one-by-one and you should be fine during a prolonged outage (and as long as there is sunshine...)
  - namibj 6y ago
    Take a look at online UPS systems. They convert incoming power to battery voltage, keep the battery charged, and output via an inverter that's made to run without being tied to the grid. They shouldn't be that costly if you can find them without large batteries, instead just hooking them up to your own.
- pjc50 6y ago
  The 50% solution with CCGT making up for variability seems to be working just fine. Wind is a lot more consistent than you think, especially offshore. Does mean we're dependent on gas for the medium term. Nuclear and pumped storage takes a very long time to build. The other storage systems are starting to make inroads - tiny ones so far, but growing rapidly. The "fast frequency response" market provides them economic support.
  - makomk 6y ago
    It seems to work, but this is about at the limit of what it can achieve - the UK is having to switch off renewable power sources increasingly aggressively to stop them from going any higher for grid stability reasons, and pay them quite a bit to do so.
    - g8oz 6y ago
      The ability of utilities to incorporate renewables seems to have improved over the years. I'm sure it will only get better. In particular the approach of handling excess production by producing "green" hydrogen and storing it in the natural gas distribution network seems promising.
      - cbmuser 6y ago
        Germany needs 1.6 TWh of electricty per day. If you know the caloric value of methane for example, you will be able to calculate the amount of methane you need to synthesize to just store the electricity of one day which will be roughly 3.2 million gas trucks (45.000 liters each). There is a reason why the UK is building or planning new nuclear power plants in Hinkley Point, Sizewell and Bredwell.
        g8oz 6y ago
        The German gas network can store 200TWh. I believe that power to gas has a bright future. Check out what Hydrogenics is doing. Also, storage doesn’t have to be day scale to be useful.
- ghouse 6y ago
  Renewables today are displacing energy 1:1. So, directly offsetting the fuel that would have otherwise been burned. You're correct, that there is not a 1:1 reduction in fossil capacity through the construction of renewable capacity. But the fossil capacity is used less, as the marginal cost of the renewable energy is near zero. Most pumped hydro today (at least in the US) was built during the nuclear build-out because nuclear can't easily be "load following." So, we had to build out additional infrastructure with low capacity factor. IMO, tax emissions, let the free market figure it out.
  - Akronymus 6y ago
    For context: I live in austria, where we have the alps that provide a large amount of storage capacity. Sadly we never got that nuclear power plant.
    - qserasera 6y ago
      I wonder if Germany actually will start to decommision all nuclear plants in 2022. From what I've heard they had some insane corruption in storing waste and not the best reactor designs.
      - cbmuser 6y ago
        Your rumors are untrue. Germany has one of the best reactor designs (the Konvoi) which was the basis for the new European Pressurized Reactor (EPR). Also, there is no corruption around storing waste because we aren't storing waste yet anywhere outside nuclear facilities which are supervised by the government and the IAEA.
        qserasera 6y ago
        Wow it looks like there has been some deep cleansing of articles about poor radioactive storage in Morsleben from a few reputable outlets. I'm not going to waste my life busting that censorship. Censoring those articles rather proves my point about corruption. IAEA failed in Iran due to political posturing from europe. Europe has broken more than a few core international organizations. I'd rather not trust them to not cover up anything else for europe.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago
  There's no need for baseline power in any power grid. The only type of power needed is peak power. You could run a grid on 100% natural gas peaker plants. The only reason to add baseline or intermittent power is if they're cheaper than the peaker plants or have some other advantage like being more green.
  - Akronymus 6y ago
    I meant environmentally independent power sources as being baseline power. Probably bad wording on my part. You can not guarantee, no matter the capacity of power storage, that you never produce too little power over a long enough period. This is the basis of my opinion that the closer to 100% renewable you get the faster the amount of additional capacity you need rises. Something like 1/x over-provisioning[1] needed, where x is the percentage of environmentally independent power sources. [1] Not sure if that is the right word.
    - bryanlarsen 6y ago
      Conventional plants need to be over-provisioned too, because of the possibility that one or more plants have a malfunction and have to shut down, possibly during a period of high load. Put another way, it's probably more likely that they'll be some sort of equipment malfunction than we go an entire month with no wind. Providing redundancy through independent mechanism (over-provisioning, storage, diverse sources) helps a lot. But you're right. A grid that's 99% renewable with a natural gas peaker providing that last 1% will be a lot cheaper than a grid that's 100% renewable.
      - ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
        Working in that industry, my eyes roll whenever I see someone talk about "baseline" power. You are right in that there is no such thing as "baseline" generation really. And thermal plants also need to be over-provisioned. There is dispatchable and non dispatchable power, the former being plants that can alter output on demand. Base-load is the point which the 24 hour cycle of demand doesn't go below. It's pretty much just a number. Who occupies the base of the generation stack and will stay running during low demand, is the one who is cheapest. If wind is cheaper than nuclear, it will displace nuclear. The people who say "IMO we need nuclear for baseline and renewable for peaking" completely miss these facts. The way it is going is renewable at the base of the stack and dispatchable power filling in the gaps, be that during peak or periods of low renewable output.
- soperj 6y ago
  Pumped storage, like all hydro can be the cause of major emissions depending on how much and what they flood. Anything with forest and suddenly they're actually worse than coal (in terms of Climate Change emissions, not the other nasty shit)
- guerby 6y ago
  For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1) For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2) (1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor (2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors Not far from so-called "baseload"
  - martinald 6y ago
    That's quite misleading though. You can choose and schedule maintenance slots so they don't overlap all at once. Much harder to do with wind, hence you get 0MW output at some times, and massive overgenereration at once causing very negative electricity prices.
    - guerby 6y ago
      Yes and sometimes you have unplanned 680 MW to 0 with "baseload" nuclear: https://www.energylivenews.com/2015/12/15/unplanned-shutdown-of-edfs-nuclear-reactor/ https://www.energylivenews.com/2015/12/15/unplanned-shutdown... Wind is intermitent but predictable. Loosing a turbine will not make the plant production go to zero (albeit loosing transmission will but same for all power plants).
      - cbmuser 6y ago
        One nuclear reactor out of 57. Wow, that's really a problem. On the other hand, we have times in Germany when wind and solar are producing less than 1% of their installed power.
curiousllama 6y ago
I don't think we disagree at all! I think we agree on the core question (can it be used at scale), and that there have been GREAT strides in developed countries towards an answer ("yes!"). I just think Opium farmers in Afghanistan fail to demonstrate a unique use case: great idea, but we've known this works for a while, so this use case isn't not exactly a panacea of novel insight.
beoh 6y ago
A good visualization of those numbers: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map
jeffreyrogers 6y ago
At least 40% of the renewables used in Europe (I think it is over 60% now) is biomass, so it's arguable how renewable it really is.
- guerby 6y ago
  renewable energy including wood for heating yes. But for electricity it's only about 6% in the EU, see table page 7 of the following PDF: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin2/Projekte/2018/EU-Jahresauswertung_2019/Agora-Energiewende_European-Power-Sector-2018_WEB.pdf https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin2/Projekte/2018/E...
- cbmuser 6y ago
  Which cause 290 grams of CO2 per kWh according to IPCC unlike nuclear which just accounts for 12 grams of CO2 per kWh.
- ericd 6y ago
  Pretty sure that's renewable. I think renewable just means we can replace it/make more of it, which isn't the case with oil. You can renew the supply.
  - jeffreyrogers 6y ago
    It depends how fast you use them. Are we using biomass at faster than replacement rate? Probably. And cutting down forests for biomass does irreparable damage to forest ecosystems.
cbmuser 6y ago
These numbers are highly misleading as: - they count biomass as renewable which is not (it is responsible for 230 g CO2 per kWh) - these numbers are accumulated, i.e integrated values which don't help much because you buy electricity when you need it, not vice versa - despite Germany being 50% renenwable, we still are one of the dirtiest electricity producers in Europe with 400 g CO2 per kWh on average while France has 50 g on average per kWh - we also have the highest electricity prices in Europe and the second-highest electricity prices world-wide > https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ > https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics/de https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Oh, and Germany is replacing nuclear with gas and coal, which means replacing 12 g CO2 per kWh with 490 g CO2 or even 800 g CO2 per kWh: > https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/nachfolge-fuer-gundremmingen-neues-gaskraftwerk-in-schwaben,S4alMRb https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/nachfolge-fuer-gundremm... > https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-im-land-enbw-baut-neues-kraftwerk-im-kreis-ludwigsburg.c5ab8105-272e-4dd1-8552-6cb86680e5fb.html https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-... > https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht-ans-netz-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht... The so-called Energiewende will have cost Germany 520 billion Euros by 2025: > https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende-kostet-die-Buerger-520-000-000-000-Euro-erstmal.html https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende... Yet it had hardly any impact on our emissions in the energy sector: > https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/treibhausgas-emissionen-in-deutschland-1990-bis https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/treibhausgas-emissionen-... If you want to understand why the Energiewende (replacing everything with renewables) doesn't work, go to smard.de, click "Market Data Visuals" and "Actual Generation" and you will see that there are recurring points in time where the power generation of wind and solar is around just 1%. Note: Before you suggest storage: Germany consumes 1600 GWh electricity per day. We have only 40 GWh of pump-storage capacity, so that won't work. And in case you want to suggest "Power2Gas", I suggest having a look at the caloric value of methane and calculate how much methane you will at least need to generate if you want to store 1.6 TWh of electricity.
- ericd 6y ago
  >- they count biomass as renewable which is not (it is responsible for 230 g CO2 per kWh) Renewable doesn't mean 0 CO2, it means you can renew the fuel. We know how to turn that CO2 back into biomass, it just takes a field. We historically haven't known how to make large quantities of oil without expending some other non-renewable fuel.

Akronymus 6y ago

The only problem I have with that, is that renewables can mostly only be treated as a bonus. Trying to rely on them for baseline power means you have to put out a LOT more capacity than you'd need with fossils. IMO baseline being nuclear and the rest being mostly renewables (With HEAVY reliance on pumped storage power plants, as a sort of capacitor) is the way to go to minimize emissions.

acomjean 6y ago
We have a solar array on the house. A lot of the Dc to AC solar inverters used in residential installs use the grid to match the frequency of the AC. The downside is with no grid power the solar system doesn’t work to power the house. There are systems that can but they’re more money.
- cookieswumchorr 6y ago
  can you directly use the DC as a reserve source? like, install car plugs in the house? there are lots of smaller everyday electrical gear for this standard
  - extrapickles 6y ago
    That works for small cabins and lighting, as a 12v car outlet requires the same thickness of wire as a normal AC outlet. This is somewhat popular to do if you don’t need to use any high power appliances as then you can skip needing an inverter.
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    It's actually a much more interesting question than you might expect. Lots of modern appliances could run perfectly on DC of around the RMS voltage. For example the most modern fridges rectify the incoming mains to drive a brushless DC motor, this allows them to run at an appropriate speed rather than using bang bang control. Even an an induction hob, you might think it was most reliant on having an AC waveform but actually they need a much higher frequency so again they rectify the incoming mains. Obviously it's not quite that easy, for example an oven uses resistive heating elements which would work fine on DC, however, the relay in the control circuitry wouldn't be able to switch a DC voltage.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Transfer switch to a very small inverter run off a battery; add your loads one-by-one and you should be fine during a prolonged outage (and as long as there is sunshine...)
- namibj 6y ago
  Take a look at online UPS systems. They convert incoming power to battery voltage, keep the battery charged, and output via an inverter that's made to run without being tied to the grid. They shouldn't be that costly if you can find them without large batteries, instead just hooking them up to your own.
pjc50 6y ago
The 50% solution with CCGT making up for variability seems to be working just fine. Wind is a lot more consistent than you think, especially offshore. Does mean we're dependent on gas for the medium term. Nuclear and pumped storage takes a very long time to build. The other storage systems are starting to make inroads - tiny ones so far, but growing rapidly. The "fast frequency response" market provides them economic support.
- makomk 6y ago
  It seems to work, but this is about at the limit of what it can achieve - the UK is having to switch off renewable power sources increasingly aggressively to stop them from going any higher for grid stability reasons, and pay them quite a bit to do so.
  - g8oz 6y ago
    The ability of utilities to incorporate renewables seems to have improved over the years. I'm sure it will only get better. In particular the approach of handling excess production by producing "green" hydrogen and storing it in the natural gas distribution network seems promising.
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      Germany needs 1.6 TWh of electricty per day. If you know the caloric value of methane for example, you will be able to calculate the amount of methane you need to synthesize to just store the electricity of one day which will be roughly 3.2 million gas trucks (45.000 liters each). There is a reason why the UK is building or planning new nuclear power plants in Hinkley Point, Sizewell and Bredwell.
      - g8oz 6y ago
        The German gas network can store 200TWh. I believe that power to gas has a bright future. Check out what Hydrogenics is doing. Also, storage doesn’t have to be day scale to be useful.
ghouse 6y ago
Renewables today are displacing energy 1:1. So, directly offsetting the fuel that would have otherwise been burned. You're correct, that there is not a 1:1 reduction in fossil capacity through the construction of renewable capacity. But the fossil capacity is used less, as the marginal cost of the renewable energy is near zero. Most pumped hydro today (at least in the US) was built during the nuclear build-out because nuclear can't easily be "load following." So, we had to build out additional infrastructure with low capacity factor. IMO, tax emissions, let the free market figure it out.
- Akronymus 6y ago
  For context: I live in austria, where we have the alps that provide a large amount of storage capacity. Sadly we never got that nuclear power plant.
  - qserasera 6y ago
    I wonder if Germany actually will start to decommision all nuclear plants in 2022. From what I've heard they had some insane corruption in storing waste and not the best reactor designs.
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      Your rumors are untrue. Germany has one of the best reactor designs (the Konvoi) which was the basis for the new European Pressurized Reactor (EPR). Also, there is no corruption around storing waste because we aren't storing waste yet anywhere outside nuclear facilities which are supervised by the government and the IAEA.
      - qserasera 6y ago
        Wow it looks like there has been some deep cleansing of articles about poor radioactive storage in Morsleben from a few reputable outlets. I'm not going to waste my life busting that censorship. Censoring those articles rather proves my point about corruption. IAEA failed in Iran due to political posturing from europe. Europe has broken more than a few core international organizations. I'd rather not trust them to not cover up anything else for europe.
bryanlarsen 6y ago
There's no need for baseline power in any power grid. The only type of power needed is peak power. You could run a grid on 100% natural gas peaker plants. The only reason to add baseline or intermittent power is if they're cheaper than the peaker plants or have some other advantage like being more green.
- Akronymus 6y ago
  I meant environmentally independent power sources as being baseline power. Probably bad wording on my part. You can not guarantee, no matter the capacity of power storage, that you never produce too little power over a long enough period. This is the basis of my opinion that the closer to 100% renewable you get the faster the amount of additional capacity you need rises. Something like 1/x over-provisioning[1] needed, where x is the percentage of environmentally independent power sources. [1] Not sure if that is the right word.
  - bryanlarsen 6y ago
    Conventional plants need to be over-provisioned too, because of the possibility that one or more plants have a malfunction and have to shut down, possibly during a period of high load. Put another way, it's probably more likely that they'll be some sort of equipment malfunction than we go an entire month with no wind. Providing redundancy through independent mechanism (over-provisioning, storage, diverse sources) helps a lot. But you're right. A grid that's 99% renewable with a natural gas peaker providing that last 1% will be a lot cheaper than a grid that's 100% renewable.
    - ourlordcaffeine 6y ago
      Working in that industry, my eyes roll whenever I see someone talk about "baseline" power. You are right in that there is no such thing as "baseline" generation really. And thermal plants also need to be over-provisioned. There is dispatchable and non dispatchable power, the former being plants that can alter output on demand. Base-load is the point which the 24 hour cycle of demand doesn't go below. It's pretty much just a number. Who occupies the base of the generation stack and will stay running during low demand, is the one who is cheapest. If wind is cheaper than nuclear, it will displace nuclear. The people who say "IMO we need nuclear for baseline and renewable for peaking" completely miss these facts. The way it is going is renewable at the base of the stack and dispatchable power filling in the gaps, be that during peak or periods of low renewable output.
soperj 6y ago
Pumped storage, like all hydro can be the cause of major emissions depending on how much and what they flood. Anything with forest and suddenly they're actually worse than coal (in terms of Climate Change emissions, not the other nasty shit)
guerby 6y ago
For the past two years (2018 2019) capacity factor of nuclear power in France has been around 70% mainly due to maintenance according to RTE (1) For reference best UK offshore wind farm had 55.3% capacity factor in 2019 and UK offshore wind average capacity factor was 40.6% in 2019 (2) (1) https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ https://media.rte-france.com/bilan-electrique-2019-2/ 379.5 Twh produced, 63.1 GW installed, 68.7% capacity factor (2) https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors https://energynumbers.info/uk-offshore-wind-capacity-factors Not far from so-called "baseload"
- martinald 6y ago
  That's quite misleading though. You can choose and schedule maintenance slots so they don't overlap all at once. Much harder to do with wind, hence you get 0MW output at some times, and massive overgenereration at once causing very negative electricity prices.
  - guerby 6y ago
    Yes and sometimes you have unplanned 680 MW to 0 with "baseload" nuclear: https://www.energylivenews.com/2015/12/15/unplanned-shutdown-of-edfs-nuclear-reactor/ https://www.energylivenews.com/2015/12/15/unplanned-shutdown... Wind is intermitent but predictable. Loosing a turbine will not make the plant production go to zero (albeit loosing transmission will but same for all power plants).
    - cbmuser 6y ago
      One nuclear reactor out of 57. Wow, that's really a problem. On the other hand, we have times in Germany when wind and solar are producing less than 1% of their installed power.

curiousllama 6y ago

I don't think we disagree at all! I think we agree on the core question (can it be used at scale), and that there have been GREAT strides in developed countries towards an answer ("yes!"). I just think Opium farmers in Afghanistan fail to demonstrate a unique use case: great idea, but we've known this works for a while, so this use case isn't not exactly a panacea of novel insight.

beoh 6y ago

A good visualization of those numbers: https://www.electricitymap.org/map https://www.electricitymap.org/map

jeffreyrogers 6y ago

At least 40% of the renewables used in Europe (I think it is over 60% now) is biomass, so it's arguable how renewable it really is.

guerby 6y ago
renewable energy including wood for heating yes. But for electricity it's only about 6% in the EU, see table page 7 of the following PDF: https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin2/Projekte/2018/EU-Jahresauswertung_2019/Agora-Energiewende_European-Power-Sector-2018_WEB.pdf https://www.agora-energiewende.de/fileadmin2/Projekte/2018/E...
cbmuser 6y ago
Which cause 290 grams of CO2 per kWh according to IPCC unlike nuclear which just accounts for 12 grams of CO2 per kWh.
ericd 6y ago
Pretty sure that's renewable. I think renewable just means we can replace it/make more of it, which isn't the case with oil. You can renew the supply.
- jeffreyrogers 6y ago
  It depends how fast you use them. Are we using biomass at faster than replacement rate? Probably. And cutting down forests for biomass does irreparable damage to forest ecosystems.

cbmuser 6y ago

These numbers are highly misleading as: - they count biomass as renewable which is not (it is responsible for 230 g CO2 per kWh) - these numbers are accumulated, i.e integrated values which don't help much because you buy electricity when you need it, not vice versa - despite Germany being 50% renenwable, we still are one of the dirtiest electricity producers in Europe with 400 g CO2 per kWh on average while France has 50 g on average per kWh - we also have the highest electricity prices in Europe and the second-highest electricity prices world-wide > https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ > https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_price_statistics/de https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Oh, and Germany is replacing nuclear with gas and coal, which means replacing 12 g CO2 per kWh with 490 g CO2 or even 800 g CO2 per kWh: > https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/nachfolge-fuer-gundremmingen-neues-gaskraftwerk-in-schwaben,S4alMRb https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/nachfolge-fuer-gundremm... > https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-im-land-enbw-baut-neues-kraftwerk-im-kreis-ludwigsburg.c5ab8105-272e-4dd1-8552-6cb86680e5fb.html https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.energieversorgung-... > https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht-ans-netz-100.html https://www1.wdr.de/nachrichten/ruhrgebiet/datteln-vier-geht... The so-called Energiewende will have cost Germany 520 billion Euros by 2025: > https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende-kostet-die-Buerger-520-000-000-000-Euro-erstmal.html https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article158668152/Energiewende... Yet it had hardly any impact on our emissions in the energy sector: > https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/treibhausgas-emissionen-in-deutschland-1990-bis https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/treibhausgas-emissionen-... If you want to understand why the Energiewende (replacing everything with renewables) doesn't work, go to smard.de, click "Market Data Visuals" and "Actual Generation" and you will see that there are recurring points in time where the power generation of wind and solar is around just 1%. Note: Before you suggest storage: Germany consumes 1600 GWh electricity per day. We have only 40 GWh of pump-storage capacity, so that won't work. And in case you want to suggest "Power2Gas", I suggest having a look at the caloric value of methane and calculate how much methane you will at least need to generate if you want to store 1.6 TWh of electricity.

ericd 6y ago
>- they count biomass as renewable which is not (it is responsible for 230 g CO2 per kWh) Renewable doesn't mean 0 CO2, it means you can renew the fuel. We know how to turn that CO2 back into biomass, it just takes a field. We historically haven't known how to make large quantities of oil without expending some other non-renewable fuel.