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The problem aren’t the gas plants, the problem is the insufficient amount of cheap electricity on the market. Wind and PV heavily rely on backup power plants.
by cbmuser 4y ago
The problem aren’t the gas plants, the problem is the insufficient amount of cheap electricity on the market.
Wind and PV heavily rely on backup power plants. So building a lot of wind and PV increases the reliance on gas plants instead of reducing it.
Even the government’s own energy agency "DENA" makes this claim.
See: https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-Leitstudie_Integrierte_Energiewende_Ergebnisbericht.pdf https://www.dena.de/fileadmin/dena/Dokumente/Pdf/9262_dena-L... (p. 28f).
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoIt is a paradox. The more renewables you will build, the more dependent on fossil fuels you will become.
- tfourb 4y agoUp to a point. Long term the idea is to get rid of fossil fuels entirely and there are good indications that this is achievable.
- belorn 4y agoDuring this fall when journalist was interviewing every kind of energy scientists, the estimates landed around 30-50 years from now before those fossil fuel replacements will start to be built at grid scale. That is a very long time into the future, with a very high uncertainty.
- tfourb 4y agoThere are already grid scale chemical batteries being built, i.e. in Australia. Hydro has been used as a grid scale buffer for decades.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoCapacity of those batteries is like a fart in a hurricane.
- tfourb 4y agoLittle thought experiment: - Offshore wind costs about 3 Million USD/MW to install - Germany currently has 218,000 MW installed capacity, about 130,000 MW of this is already renewable energy, but let's ignore that for the moment - So to add 218,000 MW installed renewable energy capacity you'll need 654 Billion USD - Germany currently has an annual federal budget of 476 Billion USD So to add 100% to the currently installed electricity generation capacity in Germany, the German government would have to spend less than 5% of its current annual budget each year for 30 years. Let's say 6%, if you add some money to switch out network components to deal with greater variability in network loads. That seems very achievable, especially because of course most of this money will come from private investments, not the state. If required, industrialized economies could of course spend the required sums to build out their installed capacities by a factor of 2,3 or 5. That would reduce the need for base load capable producers drastically, as well as the need for grid-scale storage.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y agoOr you could just write that for exorbitant sum of money you get meaningless amount of storage. Additionally you need cash out that sum periodically because batteries has limited amount of cycles.
- concordDance 4y agoI don't yet know of a storage solution that wouldn't increase electricity prices by $0.60/kwh if we switched fully to solar and wind. Its actually much cheaper to just go full 100% nuclear and export your excess.
- tfourb 4y agoThe German government relied heavily on the theory that gas power plants could facilitate the turn to renewable energies. In and off itself this was not a bad idea. But combined with getting 50% of all natural gas imports from a single (hostile) country it was a terrible decision. Diversifying natural gas imports and having more long-term contracts with other producers would have been slightly more expensive before the Ukraine war, but it would have drastically reduced the price jumps thereafter.
- 7952 4y agoYou need to have a lot of gas capacity but the actual usage of that capacity can drop.