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You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas. With nuclear being phased out for ideological re
by cbmuser 4y ago
You don’t get 100% renewable in Germany. The mix is 50% renewables, the rest is nuclear, coal and natural gas.
With nuclear being phased out for ideological reasons and natural gas being scarse due to the war in Ukraine, Germany will soon burn more coal than ever.
New electricity contracts already go as high as 70 Cents/kWh thanks to the misguided energy policy in Germany.
- Symbiote 4y agoIt's possible to pay extra for only renewable electricity.
- joss82 4y agoNo you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally. Please don't let the brainwashing gets to you and inform yourself.
- highwaylights 4y agoThere's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use. In a lot of countries customers are billed significantly less during the night than during the day for electricity, so the incentives already exist to make it financially worthwhile if a home battery pack that can provide a days typical use can be installed at a reasonable cost. This would substantially smooth out base load requirements and mean that renewables could make up substantially more of the energy mix.
- joss82 4y ago> There's a massive business opportunity for someone willing to produce low density batteries for home use. Can you explain why, please? I'm genuinely interested. I don't understand how this would be anything other than rich prepper niche market. Installing batteries in all homes is going to be more expensive than grid storage, since you will need to pay more in total installation costs rather than installing ginormous grid batteries (or reversible dams, where feasible) in bulk.
- highwaylights 4y agoMy thinking on this is that if you don't need to pack the energy storage into a small volume (like in a vehicle), and if weight is less critically important (as it'll occupy space in e.g. a garage), it opens up a lot more options for storage medium (as an example, iron-flow packs). At scale the costs could come down quite substantially given that the basic chemistry is iron, salt, water and little else - at which point it's a substantial financial boon to the customer given that they could see an up to 50% reduction in their energy costs (going by tariffs in my own region) to compensate.
- aembleton 4y agoCouldn't the grid install these somewhere for less than every home doing their own installation? The net effect would be the same but might be cheaper overall.
- reaperducer 4y agoWhen it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. Since this thread is about Germany, and not everyone on HN reads threads in scope, it's worth pointing out that this is not universal. In most of Texas, for example, the wind blows most fiercely — and regularly — at night. Solar power contributes to the grid during the day, and wind power picks up that generation loss when the sun goes down. I once saw a graph of it from a utility regulator published in a newspaper. Not every geography is so lucky in this manner. But because this is the global internet, it's important to point out that solar and wind aren't exclusively daytime sources on most of the planet. What Germany needs is a source of wind that works at night. I've read that Spain imports energy from North Africa. Perhaps a more robust link in that direction is the solution.
- sveme 4y agoWind blows over the north sea day and night.
- HotHotLava 4y agoThere are several power companies in Germany that are offering 100% green power after X years, in the sense that they're committing to constructing or buying new green power plants with a generating capacity at least as high as the amount sold X years ago. The actual power from your outlet is going to be the same no matter which company you buy from, but it's still buying "green power" in a more meaningful way than a zero-sum relabeling.
- merb 4y ago> No you can't (unless you do it yourself but the price is extremely high if you want uninterrupted power). What happens is: your provider purchase "green energy certificates" which means that some green electricity was generated on a sunny and/or windy day. When it's night and the wind don't blow, you use coal and gas as everyone else. that is bullshit. also besides that germany is small compared to other countries and dense, there is no time of the day where its nowhere windy nor sunny. so at the moment there is just no need to purchase green energy certificates for the bigger providers, they can either buy power from other providers or they can produce their green power. and also it does not matter, since if you need 3kW and they can't deliver green power at the moment they will deliver more green power later, thats how it usually works. > No storage is cheap enough to store solar and wind energy on day-to-day scale, let alone seasonally. also bullshit. it has nothing to do with cost, more with there is no storage for everybody. most providers that offer 100% green power actually do generate the amount of power in green that you use (that is their premise) of course they can't create different power lines, thus it's a mix. (in germany it's forbidden to mark your product as "100% green power" if you buy certificates, of course you can write it some where but if your contract states it, it would be illegal, but there is a difference between contract and marketing, of course... Energiewirtschaftsgesetz - EnWG §42)
- thatguy0900 4y agoI'm curious what that actually accomplishes in non marketing terms. That just means someone else is getting less renewable electricity, right?
- pavon 4y agoIt depends on what other market forces there are. If the utility has a government mandate to install more renewable energy than there are renewable energy customers, then it is like you say - just a book-keeping exercise. On the other hand, if there is no government mandate, or if customer demand for renewable energy exceeds that mandate, then it provides a profit incentive for the utility to install/purchase more renewable energy.
- pmyteh 4y agoOne of the British '100% renewable' companies used to buy renewable power and then destroy their surplus resellable renewable obligation certificates instead of selling them (each supplier was obliged to hold certificates covering x% of their supply, where x << 100). That had the consequence that the renewable power generated was genuinely additional, as the other generators would have to get their renewable obligation certificates from new generation rather than the secondary market, at the margin. They stopped, publicly reasoning that the proceeds from selling certs could be used to build their own additional renewable generation. I suspect it was just leaving too much money on the table, though.
- seb314 4y agoSome providers promise to build new renewable capacity that matches the consumption of their customers (not sure about the timeframe). I'm not aware of any provider that builds the required storage too, though
- milicat 4y agoWell, it makes a difference what kind of energy supplier turns a profit from your energy consumption. If you're buying renewable energy from a company that still invests into fossil fuels, it's fairly useless. If you buy it from a company that mainly builds up renewable energy production capacity, that helps the transition. Of course, even a 100% renewable supplier needs to buy from the market to smooth out peaks in energy consumption for their customer base. (disclaimer: i work for such a renewable energy supplier)
- Zr40 4y agoThere isn't enough renewable energy yet to cover all consumption. Which means that you paying extra is only an administrative move. You're just swapping places with the party that would otherwise have consumed the renewable energy.
- layer8 4y agoYou’re financing the further development of renewables.
- highwaylights 4y agoThe rush out of nuclear fission power still shocks me. It's a miracle fuel. It really is wonderful. It solves climate change almost by itself, or it would have, had Chernobyl and Fukushima not been reported so irresponsibly.
- LadyCailin 4y agoIt seems like that might be changing again though, now that non-renewable energy prices are so high.
- belter 4y ago"The history behind Germany's nuclear phase-out": https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-germanys-nuclear-phase-out https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-ge...
- wasmitnetzen 4y agoIt would be miracle fuel if any country in the world would have solved the waste problem by now. Finland is close, but still not done.
- vbezhenar 4y agoRussia recycles nuclear waste into nuclear fuel.
- watsocd 4y agoResearch what France does. They recycle the waste because it is not waste, it just needs processing and can be used again. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-the-nuclear-fuel-cycle-what-can-oui-learn https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/frances-efficiency-in-t...
- wasmitnetzen 4y agoThey're not reducing their waste to zero, so that's not a full solution to the waste problem.
- iwillbeshutup 4y ago
- sdoering 4y agoWith nuclear being 6.3 percent and the rest of this half of the circle being coal and a bit of gas.
- longsword 4y agoIt's not 100% renewable in the Mix. Thats not what he said. It just means, that he picked a supplier, which exclusively buys renewable energy on the energy market. Obviously it's still the same energy mix, which arrives on your house. But your money won't support Coal Power Plants.