3 ms·
Long overdue: I'm all for subsidizing renewables, let's down them in money. But the way it's currently done in Germany erases all incentive to tap low hanging f
by usrusr 2y ago
Long overdue: I'm all for subsidizing renewables, let's down them in money. But the way it's currently done in Germany erases all incentive to tap low hanging fruit in dispatchability. Which has lead to the ubiquitous biogas setups (capture methane that's created in the agricultural refuse>fertilizer cycle anyways and burn it for heat and electricity) all getting designed for continuously burning exactly the amount produced, instead of adding a little overcapacity in conversion throughput and the little short term gas storage that would be required to follow the intraday cycle. This would be easy enough, but the reality is that those biogas systems in Germany now run baseload with even less dispatchability than nuclear.
- anovikov 2y agoIndeed. Biogas has to be used to balance wind and solar. Not to be used as a carbon-free replacement for coal. This is ridiculous.
- usrusr 2y agoAdding to my old post, I suspect that those broken incentives were the result of mixing "how" and "how much" in political decisionmaking. That's a process problem I see repeated over and over again: the "how much" is not isolated from the "how" and then you get compromises that are too generous in some parts and too frugal in other parts. It's as if compromises in salary negotiation went "yeah, we could agree on 10% more each month, if in turn we skip payment in December". I believe that politics could get much better results if compromises about the particularities of distribution were always discussed with an open scale factor shared across the entire range of a particular kind of spending (e.g. renewables subsidy), and then the scale factor was decided upon in a separate discussion/compromise.