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The Germans paid for it creating the market/industry. Vast amounts. Then the Chinese thought it looked like a good industry to be in and threw unbelievable mone

The Germans paid for it creating the market/industry. Vast amounts. Then the Chinese thought it looked like a good industry to be in and threw unbelievable money at developing manufacturing capacity. If the Germans keep voting green and being parsimonious savers then we may yet get cheap batteries and survive.

99_00 6y ago
Is Germany's experience a success or failure? What is the counter to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05/renewables-threaten-german-economy-energy-supply-mckinsey-warns-in-new-report/?sh=3237d9368e48 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05...
- haberman 6y ago
  "What is the counter to this article?" does not deserve downvotes.
  - merb 6y ago
    well the problem in our grid is mostly coal. it's cheap (in germany since it's subsidized for the next x years) but it generates exactly the problems in the article. basically mckinsey study is not against green energy, it's more of a "politics do way too less" i.e. mckinsey analyzes the co2 targets for germany and it critizes it for doing way too less and having unrealistic expectations. news article basically love such studies besides that the studies in question want to show that we need to do even more. tbf between '19 and '20 we atleast reduced lots of lignite/hard coal in favor of wind (onshore) but 2019 (year of the article) it was really really bad for renweable in germany, we actually only talked about green energy, but internally we were really dirty... but we are still behind norway, sweden, denmark and lots of other countries.
- zdragnar 6y ago
  A charitable reply would be advances (real and predicted) in energy storage- I dont think anyone is deluded into thinking that wind or solar alone form a good baseline. That said, Germany's investments are clearly a failure, IF you go by the desired carbon reduction goals for 2020-2030. I also don't know anyone who genuinely believes any of those carbon goals are feasible, or that we have high odds of hitting them... but that might just be that I tend to have cynical friends.
  - _carbyau_ 6y ago
    I honestly think the goals are technically feasible. I would even go so far as to say easily so. But ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons I put my money on the world failing horribly and plan accordingly.
    - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
      What’s that plan look like?
      - _carbyau_ 6y ago
        Anecdotally, where I currently live in an apartment in Australia. We have occasional brownouts/blackouts in summer when everyone is running their aircon. Not often, but likely to happen more with higher temperatures. I am keeping an eye on things like Tesla's Powerwall as a luxury item for that concern. Especially for when I am over 60 years old... (20 years away but still a thought.) I plan to visit the Great Barrier Reef now, while it is living. Operating temperatures for outdoor mechanicals. For me, small aircon, cars. But big building infrastructure, factories, farmers etc buying and building for the future will have to expand their operational parameters, if only slowly and only a comparatively small amount. Highly underrated though is more energy in the system will mean more extreme weather events more often. Floods, heat waves, hail storms, but also with large shifting air cycles it often surprises people to realise that blizzards or cold snaps will happen differently too. They may be "warmer" but with faster moving air they will travel more to areas that didn't experience them. Or they may be colder as the air travels faster carrying air from the poles. Weather is not an easy thing to predict. But I think it will be even less predictable. In the US it may mean that hurricanes or tornados are a thing more often. Here in Australia Queensland will get hit more often. Insurance premiums will adjust accordingly. I suspect international migration will also be a thing. People moving away from the equator and to the poles more. TL;DR: Plan for slightly more hot, windy and extreme weather events. :-P NB: rereading this almost casts a picture of drastic disasters every day. But I want to clarify that it will be incrementally more than now over time and only a bit more by the end of my lifetime. But who wants "a bit more" hurricanes in their life? And where does it stop for the future? PS: maybe this question should be asked of an insurance company quant?
- mrDmrTmrJ 6y ago
  Great question! Here's what Germany did: They invested a vast amount in local renewables, at above market prices, that had the effect of dramatically driving down the global price of wind and solar. Because they radically expanded production capacity. Effectively, Germany gave the world a 'gift'! This had the long-term affect of dramatically increasing global solar + wind deployments (b/c prices fell) and transferring a huge economic boom to China, who actually made the solar panels and who's government subsidized production. Unfortunately, for domestics political reasons, Germany also shut down their nuclear plants and kept burning coal. So their total CO2 emissions have been roughly constant and about 10x higher, per person, than France or Sweden. The article is correct in that vastly more electrical transmission is needed to effectively integrate renewables. The article is misleading in describing price spikes. Yes, there are 2-45 days a year of price spikes for a few hours, but on average price is lower b/c of renewables outside of Germany. (Again, Germany did everyone the favor of buying renewables before they were economic.) Texas average prices are some of the lowest in the world. CA wholesale power prices are very low globally, while retail prices are sky high b/c PG&E is a monopoly combined with an inadvertent domestic terrorist organization. Something the article only eludes to, the energy transition covers many more areas than just power production. Germany has done a bad job in both transportation and building emissions. They're overly reliant on Russian natural gas for heating and have been slow to embrace electric cars (VW is doing 'ok' but not great). Both issues are separate to renewables but major failings of German policy to either reduce emissions or increase energy security. Overall, the German investment in renewables electricity production is a massive success and global gift. Completely underrecognized. Everything else sits in the category between "failure" and "didn't even try."
  - 99_00 6y ago
    So basically German "failure", but global success? And everyone else who tries it will do better because Germans ate the costs?
    - mrDmrTmrJ 6y ago
      "everyone else who tries it will do better because Germans ate the costs?" Yes on both your points. Sadly, German industry didn't get the benefit. Which makes it harder to convince the country to do stuff like this again. Very different from Tesla, where a bunch of silicon valley people ate the cost (e.g. VCs, roadster, 2012 model-S) and then many benefitted as they own stock.
hangonhn 6y ago
The Germans had this really clever scheme where they tied the price they pay for solar power to the price from fossil fueled power. That really incentivized people to create more efficient solar and thus increase their profit margins.
- dmurray 6y ago
  Isn't that very close to how a normal electricity marketplace would work? The consumer mostly doesn't care if they got their electricity from renewables or not, so they pay the same price.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    No, a normal electricity marketplace would eat up the profits from getting more efficient renewables. e.g. If fossil is $4/kW and wind is $2/kW then normal market buys all the wind at $2/kW. Here, government will pay $2/kW premium on the wind. That means every cost gain on wind goes to the provider.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      In a competitive market, the surplus resulting from reduction in wholesale cost of electricity would fall mostly on consumer side: market would buy wind at $2/kWh, but the retail consumer prices would also fall correspondingly. Alas, utilities are rarely competitive markets, so the electricity retailers have more ability to capture some of the surplus.
      - renewiltord 6y ago
        Right, but here you don't want it to fall to $2. That's your mechanism of a subsidy to the generating side. It is intentionally non-competitive.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Unfortunately you can't instantly turn off fossil fuel plants. Those coal plants will still get their $4/kW and the turned off renewables also get their $2/kW because we want to subsidize them. It would be foolish to punish renewables for the failures of fossil fuels. So in the end you pay $6/kW. A carbon tax would turn off the coal plants for good and replace them with something that can throttle faster. Ironically this means carbon taxes make energy cheaper.
maxerickson 6y ago
It's basically inevitable at this point, regardless of what Germany does.
cbmuser 6y ago
That’s rather inaccurate. German electricity prices are so high because renewables need backup power plants and German law mandates that these plants (mostly coal and gas) are not allowed to operate unless wind and solar are unable to provide sufficient electricity. Also, Germany‘s energy sector still accounts to 350 million tons CO2 emissions annually while France only accounts for 50 million tons CO2 p.a. That’s the result of phasing out nuclear in Germany and over 70% nuclear in France in the electricity sector. Unless you‘re Norway or Austria or any country with lots of hydropower, renewables are neither cheap nor do they significantly help to decarbonize the electricity sector.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  That is because renewables are cheap to make now and in the future. In the past they were not, and as a result we do not have the capacity to make them at the moment (and might not before it collapses). I agree that currently nuclear makes sense as if there is political will it could be scaled up quickly and at the very least provide base power.
- amznthrwaway 6y ago
  Germany emits less than half the CO2 per capita than the US, and their per-capita CO2 emissions have been going down steadily (more than 50%!) for more than a decade. France's are lower, but Germany's decarbonization is working well. It is also incorrect to assert that the majority of Germany's power costs are due to the extra power plants. The majority of the costs are taxes and fees which have nothing to do with the extra power plants. You have numerous falsehoods in your post, your analysis is incorrect, and your conclusions are false.
- lucideer 6y ago
  Original comment: > The Germans paid for it creating the market/industry. Vast amounts. [...] If the Germans keep voting green [...] Your reply: > That’s rather inaccurate. [...] German electricity prices are so high because [...] German law mandates that these plants are not allowed to operate unless wind and solar are unable to provide sufficient electricity So what you're saying is, German lawmakers mandated the Germans pay for it... Your comment seems to be making some odd argument about the expense, as if it should be cheap? The original commenter was pointing out exactly that: it costs. "The Germans paid..." > .
zepearl 6y ago
Personally I think (hope) that huge imports from foreign countries of energy-generation hardware (thinking especially about solar panels, not sure about the rest) won't last forever and internal production of such components will be somehow in/directly promoted, which might lead at some point to a stabilization of prices (because of less competitivity / more protectionism), at least for a while. This thought being based on "energy" being a strategic resource for all nations, and no nation willingly wanting to become dependant on any other one in this context.
- fy20 6y ago
  At least in Europe prices for European vs Chinese panels are not that different. In my country I've seen Chinese panels for €80/ea and locally manufactured for €140/ea (for a ~300w panel). Most people prefer the European panels because the overall price isn't that much different, and they know if they ever need to make a warranty claim it'll be a lot easier from a European manufacturer. These are retail prices for home installation - of course for utility scale it's a different story.

99_00 6y ago

Is Germany's experience a success or failure? What is the counter to this article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05/renewables-threaten-german-economy-energy-supply-mckinsey-warns-in-new-report/?sh=3237d9368e48 https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/09/05...

haberman 6y ago
"What is the counter to this article?" does not deserve downvotes.
- merb 6y ago
  well the problem in our grid is mostly coal. it's cheap (in germany since it's subsidized for the next x years) but it generates exactly the problems in the article. basically mckinsey study is not against green energy, it's more of a "politics do way too less" i.e. mckinsey analyzes the co2 targets for germany and it critizes it for doing way too less and having unrealistic expectations. news article basically love such studies besides that the studies in question want to show that we need to do even more. tbf between '19 and '20 we atleast reduced lots of lignite/hard coal in favor of wind (onshore) but 2019 (year of the article) it was really really bad for renweable in germany, we actually only talked about green energy, but internally we were really dirty... but we are still behind norway, sweden, denmark and lots of other countries.
zdragnar 6y ago
A charitable reply would be advances (real and predicted) in energy storage- I dont think anyone is deluded into thinking that wind or solar alone form a good baseline. That said, Germany's investments are clearly a failure, IF you go by the desired carbon reduction goals for 2020-2030. I also don't know anyone who genuinely believes any of those carbon goals are feasible, or that we have high odds of hitting them... but that might just be that I tend to have cynical friends.
- _carbyau_ 6y ago
  I honestly think the goals are technically feasible. I would even go so far as to say easily so. But ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons I put my money on the world failing horribly and plan accordingly.
  - aaronblohowiak 6y ago
    What’s that plan look like?
    - _carbyau_ 6y ago
      Anecdotally, where I currently live in an apartment in Australia. We have occasional brownouts/blackouts in summer when everyone is running their aircon. Not often, but likely to happen more with higher temperatures. I am keeping an eye on things like Tesla's Powerwall as a luxury item for that concern. Especially for when I am over 60 years old... (20 years away but still a thought.) I plan to visit the Great Barrier Reef now, while it is living. Operating temperatures for outdoor mechanicals. For me, small aircon, cars. But big building infrastructure, factories, farmers etc buying and building for the future will have to expand their operational parameters, if only slowly and only a comparatively small amount. Highly underrated though is more energy in the system will mean more extreme weather events more often. Floods, heat waves, hail storms, but also with large shifting air cycles it often surprises people to realise that blizzards or cold snaps will happen differently too. They may be "warmer" but with faster moving air they will travel more to areas that didn't experience them. Or they may be colder as the air travels faster carrying air from the poles. Weather is not an easy thing to predict. But I think it will be even less predictable. In the US it may mean that hurricanes or tornados are a thing more often. Here in Australia Queensland will get hit more often. Insurance premiums will adjust accordingly. I suspect international migration will also be a thing. People moving away from the equator and to the poles more. TL;DR: Plan for slightly more hot, windy and extreme weather events. :-P NB: rereading this almost casts a picture of drastic disasters every day. But I want to clarify that it will be incrementally more than now over time and only a bit more by the end of my lifetime. But who wants "a bit more" hurricanes in their life? And where does it stop for the future? PS: maybe this question should be asked of an insurance company quant?
mrDmrTmrJ 6y ago
Great question! Here's what Germany did: They invested a vast amount in local renewables, at above market prices, that had the effect of dramatically driving down the global price of wind and solar. Because they radically expanded production capacity. Effectively, Germany gave the world a 'gift'! This had the long-term affect of dramatically increasing global solar + wind deployments (b/c prices fell) and transferring a huge economic boom to China, who actually made the solar panels and who's government subsidized production. Unfortunately, for domestics political reasons, Germany also shut down their nuclear plants and kept burning coal. So their total CO2 emissions have been roughly constant and about 10x higher, per person, than France or Sweden. The article is correct in that vastly more electrical transmission is needed to effectively integrate renewables. The article is misleading in describing price spikes. Yes, there are 2-45 days a year of price spikes for a few hours, but on average price is lower b/c of renewables outside of Germany. (Again, Germany did everyone the favor of buying renewables before they were economic.) Texas average prices are some of the lowest in the world. CA wholesale power prices are very low globally, while retail prices are sky high b/c PG&E is a monopoly combined with an inadvertent domestic terrorist organization. Something the article only eludes to, the energy transition covers many more areas than just power production. Germany has done a bad job in both transportation and building emissions. They're overly reliant on Russian natural gas for heating and have been slow to embrace electric cars (VW is doing 'ok' but not great). Both issues are separate to renewables but major failings of German policy to either reduce emissions or increase energy security. Overall, the German investment in renewables electricity production is a massive success and global gift. Completely underrecognized. Everything else sits in the category between "failure" and "didn't even try."
- 99_00 6y ago
  So basically German "failure", but global success? And everyone else who tries it will do better because Germans ate the costs?
  - mrDmrTmrJ 6y ago
    "everyone else who tries it will do better because Germans ate the costs?" Yes on both your points. Sadly, German industry didn't get the benefit. Which makes it harder to convince the country to do stuff like this again. Very different from Tesla, where a bunch of silicon valley people ate the cost (e.g. VCs, roadster, 2012 model-S) and then many benefitted as they own stock.

hangonhn 6y ago

The Germans had this really clever scheme where they tied the price they pay for solar power to the price from fossil fueled power. That really incentivized people to create more efficient solar and thus increase their profit margins.

dmurray 6y ago
Isn't that very close to how a normal electricity marketplace would work? The consumer mostly doesn't care if they got their electricity from renewables or not, so they pay the same price.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  No, a normal electricity marketplace would eat up the profits from getting more efficient renewables. e.g. If fossil is $4/kW and wind is $2/kW then normal market buys all the wind at $2/kW. Here, government will pay $2/kW premium on the wind. That means every cost gain on wind goes to the provider.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    In a competitive market, the surplus resulting from reduction in wholesale cost of electricity would fall mostly on consumer side: market would buy wind at $2/kWh, but the retail consumer prices would also fall correspondingly. Alas, utilities are rarely competitive markets, so the electricity retailers have more ability to capture some of the surplus.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Right, but here you don't want it to fall to $2. That's your mechanism of a subsidy to the generating side. It is intentionally non-competitive.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Unfortunately you can't instantly turn off fossil fuel plants. Those coal plants will still get their $4/kW and the turned off renewables also get their $2/kW because we want to subsidize them. It would be foolish to punish renewables for the failures of fossil fuels. So in the end you pay $6/kW. A carbon tax would turn off the coal plants for good and replace them with something that can throttle faster. Ironically this means carbon taxes make energy cheaper.

maxerickson 6y ago

It's basically inevitable at this point, regardless of what Germany does.

cbmuser 6y ago

That’s rather inaccurate. German electricity prices are so high because renewables need backup power plants and German law mandates that these plants (mostly coal and gas) are not allowed to operate unless wind and solar are unable to provide sufficient electricity. Also, Germany‘s energy sector still accounts to 350 million tons CO2 emissions annually while France only accounts for 50 million tons CO2 p.a. That’s the result of phasing out nuclear in Germany and over 70% nuclear in France in the electricity sector. Unless you‘re Norway or Austria or any country with lots of hydropower, renewables are neither cheap nor do they significantly help to decarbonize the electricity sector.

kmonsen 6y ago
That is because renewables are cheap to make now and in the future. In the past they were not, and as a result we do not have the capacity to make them at the moment (and might not before it collapses). I agree that currently nuclear makes sense as if there is political will it could be scaled up quickly and at the very least provide base power.
amznthrwaway 6y ago
Germany emits less than half the CO2 per capita than the US, and their per-capita CO2 emissions have been going down steadily (more than 50%!) for more than a decade. France's are lower, but Germany's decarbonization is working well. It is also incorrect to assert that the majority of Germany's power costs are due to the extra power plants. The majority of the costs are taxes and fees which have nothing to do with the extra power plants. You have numerous falsehoods in your post, your analysis is incorrect, and your conclusions are false.
lucideer 6y ago
Original comment: > The Germans paid for it creating the market/industry. Vast amounts. [...] If the Germans keep voting green [...] Your reply: > That’s rather inaccurate. [...] German electricity prices are so high because [...] German law mandates that these plants are not allowed to operate unless wind and solar are unable to provide sufficient electricity So what you're saying is, German lawmakers mandated the Germans pay for it... Your comment seems to be making some odd argument about the expense, as if it should be cheap? The original commenter was pointing out exactly that: it costs. "The Germans paid..." > .

zepearl 6y ago

Personally I think (hope) that huge imports from foreign countries of energy-generation hardware (thinking especially about solar panels, not sure about the rest) won't last forever and internal production of such components will be somehow in/directly promoted, which might lead at some point to a stabilization of prices (because of less competitivity / more protectionism), at least for a while. This thought being based on "energy" being a strategic resource for all nations, and no nation willingly wanting to become dependant on any other one in this context.

fy20 6y ago
At least in Europe prices for European vs Chinese panels are not that different. In my country I've seen Chinese panels for €80/ea and locally manufactured for €140/ea (for a ~300w panel). Most people prefer the European panels because the overall price isn't that much different, and they know if they ever need to make a warranty claim it'll be a lot easier from a European manufacturer. These are retail prices for home installation - of course for utility scale it's a different story.