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Denmark is a poor location for solar. They are pretty far north and don't have a lot of sunny days that are good for solar generation. When they do, those peaks
by SoftTalker 7mo ago
Denmark is a poor location for solar. They are pretty far north and don't have a lot of sunny days that are good for solar generation. When they do, those peaks drive energy prices negative. From the article: Over the next 10 years, the official expectation is a very large rise in the amount of solar produced. But that kind of clashes with the reality on the ground – they can’t make money
- dathinab 7mo agofrom the article which uses intentionally deceptive photography angles to paint a very different picture, yes more interesting is, if that is actually true. Or only true because idk. the investors also bought the land and they profits are used to amortize the land buying cost etc.
- delusional 7mo agoThat's a terrible argument on the face of it. "They can't make any energy, but also they make so much energy they can't use it all". I actually live in Denmark, and we can produce solar energy just fine. My dad installed rooftop solar 10 years ago, and that thing has 90% of his electricity usage since then. It's still producing at around 85% capacity too.
- littlestymaar 7mo ago> that thing has 90% of his electricity usage How is that supposed to work with cloudy days with barely 7 hours of daylight in winter?
- detourdog 7mo agoIn New England it works fine and we project 3 hours of production during the winter months. Not sure what Denmark’s latitude is, but 7 hours of production is not needed.
- littlestymaar 7mo agoNew England is Spain in terms of latitude. Americans tend to forget how far north Europe is compared to the US.
- t-writescode 7mo agoGreat Britain, even more North, has viable solar on its Southern edge.
- littlestymaar 7mo agoAs a complementary source of energy, yes, especially in summer (because the flip side of being north is that your summer days last longer). But in winter, you'll have something like 2-5% load factor on your solar panels…
- 2000UltraDeluxe 7mo agoWe have solar in Finland as well, like everyone else. Yes, it's useless in winter. Yes, the expansion has slowed down, because there is no storage and limited export options. The Nordic power market is a mess, and it's not because solar doesn't work in winter but because the grid needs massive investments on all levels and nobody wants to be left holding the bill for it. Electrification? Sure, I'll buy an EV when the _local_ grid operator makes sure my lights don't flicker when the neighbor uses an angle grinder. The last update was that they plan to replace the old transformer station from the 60's "when it breaks". Local generation? Can't get rid of the excess generation if I wanted to. Is Denmark's power grid expansion still geared at selling Swedish electricity to the Germans? Sweden? No internal transfer capacity so their consumers have constant high prices while power is exported cheaply. Norway? Geo-blocked by Sweden.
- leonidasrup 7mo agoSolar power in Finland is really not important. Data from 2025. Nuclear 32 TWh, Wind 22 TWh, Hydro 12 TWh, Solar 1 TWh. https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/finland https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/finland
- t-writescode 7mo agoSolar has always been a part of a wholistic strategy. We’ve known this ever since the sun went down at night and we had to compensate for it.
- logifail 7mo ago> strategy Umm, so we still have to build enough traditional (and, ideally, dispatchable) generation capacity to make sure we can cover our electricity needs during those periods in winter where it's very cloudy and it's not windy? eg Jan 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/22/weather-bomb-expected-to-cause-cut-in-uk-energy-prices https://www.theguardian.com/money/2025/jan/22/weather-bomb-e... "Cloudy and still weather has caused Great Britain’s renewable energy output to fall to near zero this week" "Britain’s wind power output fell to just above zero on Wednesday, which, combined with the cold, dark weather, caused the market price for electricity to climb to almost £250 per megawatt-hour at auction, or almost seven times the average price before the pandemic" "The sudden drop-off in renewable energy due to dull windless winter weather, known as dunkelflaute in German, has also forced the system operator to pay gas power stations more than £500/MWh to run on Wednesday evening when household demand is expected to reach its peak. The weather conditions – the third dunkelflaute of the winter so far – left Britain’s electricity grid reliant on gas-fired power stations. They accounted for more than 70% of power generation at points on Wednesday."
- littlestymaar 7mo agoTrue, but then why claim unrealistic figures like op and their "90% of his electricity usage"…
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 7mo agoThose days add to the 10%. Is that not obvious?
- littlestymaar 7mo agoHow do you only consume 10% of your total consumption in 1/3 of the years? Mining bitcoin in summer yo drive total consumption up?
- Dylan16807 7mo agoAre you saying it's cloudy for four months straight? And the panels are still making power during the winter. A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days. Edit: In winter, in denmark, the amount of sunlight you get per square meter of flat ground is absolutely awful. But the amount of sunlight you can catch on a highly tilted solar panel is still pretty good, about half of the average output. So if you space them properly and overbuild based on the average, the 90% number isn't crazy.
- littlestymaar 7mo ago> Are you saying it's cloudy for four months straight? No. But it's cloudy most of the time for four month straight (in average there's only 200 hours of sun between November and February in Copenhagen. Yes, you read it right, that's not even 2 hours per day in average!). > A detailed chart would be nice but a good starting point to imagine is 60-70 days that average 50% solar power and the rest of the year is full solar power minus a couple particularly bad days That's an insane assumption! An average of 50% solar power during the day is the higher bound of what you can expect in the middle of the Nevada desert! (Because you know, the sun rises and falls during the day, it's never going to give the full power during daytime). And because there's night half of the time in average, even in Nevada you end up with load factors around 25%! (Go check the figures!) In winter in Danemark, the situation is obviously far worse! A 2-5% load factor is to be expected depending on the weather. (Just check the live data: we're in April, it's 11am and solar panels are delivering just 10% of their power right now https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen_minutes https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/DK-DK1/live/fifteen... ) > the 90% number isn't crazy. If this number doesn't sounds crazy to you, it's just because you're completely off in terms of orders of magnitude involved. 90% is likely achievable in southern US with great effort, lots of storage for night times and significant over-paneling, but it's pure science fiction in Denmark.
- ZeroGravitas 7mo agoFar north places have long summer days. This doesn't align well with the winter heating needs but it does balance really well with wind generation which peaks in winter.
- fritzo 7mo agoIf it's a poor location for photovoltaics, it's exactly as a poor for photosynthesis
- amarant 7mo agoIt's very seasonal for both. But we're currently better at storing wheat for 6 months than we are at storing electricity for a similar period.
- marssaxman 7mo agoWhether you store it or not, getting free energy from the sun for half the year is better than getting no energy from the sun. Every marginal reduction in fossil fuel usage helps.
- amarant 7mo agoScandinavia is actually seeing a pattern where in the summer, there is so much electricity produced that it's approximately free, and in the winters, when solar panels produce nothing, there's not enough to go around so prices are sky high. It's a very weird situation where it's financially difficult to build new power because you'll be doing it entirely for free half the year, but then you get 4-5 months that are an absolute goldmine. Which is pretty much the ideal conditions for coal plants, so they make a killing during the winter and then shut off during the summer. We need something that works throughout the winter so we can finally get rid of the coal plants the whole year! We do not need more power in the summer though, that's covered by solar already. Denmark is very well suited for wind power.
- marssaxman 7mo agoA mix of renewables definitely seems like the way to go, but I also wonder whether we might start to see some seasonal industry based on power prices - bitcoin mines, or even aluminum smelters, which only run during summertime? Though I suppose less capital-intensive processes would make more sense.
- ninalanyon 7mo agoLatitude is not everything. Oslo, which is further north than all of Denmark gets more insolation than Hamburg, which is further south than all of Denmark. And don't forget that storage is getting cheaper so it will get more and more practical to save a some of that midday solar energy to be used in the evening.
- _moof 7mo agoI don't understand why energy production must be profitable.
- samrus 7mo agoIt does at least need to be feasible
- Ekaros 7mo agoFor it to be market based the investment must generate positive return. On other hand I would not find replacing all energy production with government run nuclear plants as unreasonable.
- leonidasrup 7mo agoEnergy production doesn't have to be profitable, but no private investor would invest into a unprofitable business. If energy production in Denmark would not by profitable, the Government of Denmark could nationalize the energy production, or push households to install more solar and sell the energy at predefined price to the grid, or increase taxes to pay out subsidies to make energy production profitable again for private investors. Or combine all this approaches.
- scoofy 7mo agoAnything that doesn’t break even suffers from its own success. If you have a public transportation system that loses money on every rider, then more people using it means everyone has to pay more (in taxes). This can all work out when the economy is good and taxes can be increased, but it’s an inherently fragile system. At exactly the moment when most people will be dependent on a publicly funded system — when times are tough — is exactly the same time when tax revenues drop. By creating a system that can’t sustain itself, you are making the system more likely to collapse in a crisis.
- torginus 7mo agoThing is, panels are so cheap that if you put them on your roof, it very well might cost the same or less as roof tiles per m2. You can also put more panels on than the rated peak of your inverter. As long as you don't surpass voltage limits, if you put on more panels, youll get more generation during non-peak hours, and it wont even affect your inverter negatively. Usually you can easily put 2x+ the peak wattage, as your inverter likely has 2 strings, and each of them can take the whole capacity of the inverter alone.