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The big problem with this is oversupply of the grid. While Denmark has the ability to export to Norway, Sweden and Germany (amongst others) it's likely wind pro

The big problem with this is oversupply of the grid. While Denmark has the ability to export to Norway, Sweden and Germany (amongst others) it's likely wind production will be at high levels in neighbouring countries. Germany often has a huge oversupply of energy, with electricity prices turning negative.

useerup 11y ago
Norway uses mainly wind and hydro, Sweden mostly hydro and nuclear. When there's surplus wind energy, Sweden and Norway scales back on hydro and import from Denmark and Germany (through Denmark) instead.
- varjag 11y ago
  The use of wind in Norway hovers around zero percent.
adamtulinius 11y ago
It's not uncommon for the price of exported danish electricity to turn negative either.
IkmoIkmo 11y ago
That surprised me a little, Germany oversupplying because of wind. Wind is about 10% of electricity there, but then I looked up variability and it explains why: https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jpeg https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jp... Pretty crazy, it really calls for storage solutions doesn't it. Hell even if you had the same smooth wind every day, there'd be a huge demand/production discrepancy during sundown if enough wind is installed.
- kaybe 11y ago
  If you run the calculations you can see that the more you have installed over capacity the less storage you need (since you can also fully provide if there is less wind). It's a trade-off, really.
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    Of course, you don't need to run any numbers to see make the logical conclusion :-/ But wouldn't it be true to say that store is the cheaper alternative to installing excess capacity, the alternative with less local resistance (a political issue with both on and offshore wind), and the alternative with fewer maintenance issues versus e.g. offshore wind? Let me know if you have any numbers on that. I've checked some numbers myself. For example, even domestic storage (which includes things like an inverter already) like the Tesla powerwall costs $3500, and has 5.000 full depth cycles of lifetime, and a capacity of 7 kwh. Meaning purely for storing and using 1 kwh, it's about $10c. That's more than the cost of onshore wind (about 7c or so, differs per country). But we know that utility scale batteries can be much cheaper (I mean these Tesla powerwalls are quite similar to batteries that go into cars, their energy density is very high due to space constraints. If space and weight is not a concern you can build cheaper batteries), plus batteries as an industry are currently on a much steeper decline in cost annually than renewable generation technologies so going in to the future storage should become much more attractive, even as extra generation becomes more attractive, too. One example is Alevo, found an interesting post about it I'll quote here: > Alevo is claiming $100/kWh and 40,000 cycles. That works out to $0.003/cycle. Financed for 20 years at 5% would mean a $0.022 price per cycle over the first 20 years and then the cost of storage dropping to roughly zero for 89 more years. That's 2-3 cents per cycle. It'd be really hard to make the case for excess wind capacity over storage. Particularly because on some days wind generation is still near zero. The image I showed shows the top day generating 200x as much as the bottom day. To generate enough on the bottom day, you need a ridiculous amount of excess capacity generation to compensate, capacity that may be more expensive per kwh than storage, that overproduces the rest of the year (while still costing money, unlike storage which costs money per cycle, i.e. when used), and exacerbates the non-financial issues of wind (e.g. landscape changes that local people resist). It's looking like storage is going to be playing a huge role.
    - martinald 11y ago
      Is there actually going to be enough lithium to build the many millions (billions?) of kWh of batteries to do this? There are other big problems too with this. Firstly, the discharge/recharge rate - are these batteries actually able to pull in all this spare capacity and discharge it quickly enough - and also there is some loss going from AC to DC to battery to DC to AC which changes the picture a bit. Less of an issue if you have them right next to the solar, as you can push DC straight in, but otherwise an issue.
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  either storage ...or a better grid so the electricity can be transported further. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-... I at least don't know yet how it's going to shape up.
_ph_ 11y ago
This is just a temporary problem. One alway could just switch wind/solar plants off, if there were really no other way to deal with the electricity. The problem is not so much with oversupply but, that there is not enough oversupply for other uses of electricity to become economical interesting, i.e. large scale storage, building long-range networks, power to gas, etc.
liotier 11y ago
Energy storage is quickly becoming a critical part of the distribution infrastructure, whose cost should be borne by the unpredictable intermittent producers.
the8472 11y ago
> big problem I can imagine worse problems. Certainly, it's economically suboptimal. We do need storage or some other kind of energy consuming business that can absorb energy that's nearly zero-valued on the spot market. But having so much excess renewable energy that it has to be pushed on other countries - and possibly forces coal plants to throttled back there - is not all bad.
- martinald 11y ago
  The problem is that when there is so much renewable, the other countries you are pushing it to are very likely to be oversupplied also. Right now the various grid operators pay huge money to get renewable producers to shut off production. This is not ideal.

useerup 11y ago

Norway uses mainly wind and hydro, Sweden mostly hydro and nuclear. When there's surplus wind energy, Sweden and Norway scales back on hydro and import from Denmark and Germany (through Denmark) instead.

varjag 11y ago
The use of wind in Norway hovers around zero percent.

adamtulinius 11y ago

It's not uncommon for the price of exported danish electricity to turn negative either.

IkmoIkmo 11y ago

That surprised me a little, Germany oversupplying because of wind. Wind is about 10% of electricity there, but then I looked up variability and it explains why: https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jpeg https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jp... Pretty crazy, it really calls for storage solutions doesn't it. Hell even if you had the same smooth wind every day, there'd be a huge demand/production discrepancy during sundown if enough wind is installed.

kaybe 11y ago
If you run the calculations you can see that the more you have installed over capacity the less storage you need (since you can also fully provide if there is less wind). It's a trade-off, really.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  Of course, you don't need to run any numbers to see make the logical conclusion :-/ But wouldn't it be true to say that store is the cheaper alternative to installing excess capacity, the alternative with less local resistance (a political issue with both on and offshore wind), and the alternative with fewer maintenance issues versus e.g. offshore wind? Let me know if you have any numbers on that. I've checked some numbers myself. For example, even domestic storage (which includes things like an inverter already) like the Tesla powerwall costs $3500, and has 5.000 full depth cycles of lifetime, and a capacity of 7 kwh. Meaning purely for storing and using 1 kwh, it's about $10c. That's more than the cost of onshore wind (about 7c or so, differs per country). But we know that utility scale batteries can be much cheaper (I mean these Tesla powerwalls are quite similar to batteries that go into cars, their energy density is very high due to space constraints. If space and weight is not a concern you can build cheaper batteries), plus batteries as an industry are currently on a much steeper decline in cost annually than renewable generation technologies so going in to the future storage should become much more attractive, even as extra generation becomes more attractive, too. One example is Alevo, found an interesting post about it I'll quote here: > Alevo is claiming $100/kWh and 40,000 cycles. That works out to $0.003/cycle. Financed for 20 years at 5% would mean a $0.022 price per cycle over the first 20 years and then the cost of storage dropping to roughly zero for 89 more years. That's 2-3 cents per cycle. It'd be really hard to make the case for excess wind capacity over storage. Particularly because on some days wind generation is still near zero. The image I showed shows the top day generating 200x as much as the bottom day. To generate enough on the bottom day, you need a ridiculous amount of excess capacity generation to compensate, capacity that may be more expensive per kwh than storage, that overproduces the rest of the year (while still costing money, unlike storage which costs money per cycle, i.e. when used), and exacerbates the non-financial issues of wind (e.g. landscape changes that local people resist). It's looking like storage is going to be playing a huge role.
  - martinald 11y ago
    Is there actually going to be enough lithium to build the many millions (billions?) of kWh of batteries to do this? There are other big problems too with this. Firstly, the discharge/recharge rate - are these batteries actually able to pull in all this spare capacity and discharge it quickly enough - and also there is some loss going from AC to DC to battery to DC to AC which changes the picture a bit. Less of an issue if you have them right next to the solar, as you can push DC straight in, but otherwise an issue.
Gravityloss 11y ago
either storage ...or a better grid so the electricity can be transported further. http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-a-global-power-grid http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-... I at least don't know yet how it's going to shape up.

_ph_ 11y ago

This is just a temporary problem. One alway could just switch wind/solar plants off, if there were really no other way to deal with the electricity. The problem is not so much with oversupply but, that there is not enough oversupply for other uses of electricity to become economical interesting, i.e. large scale storage, building long-range networks, power to gas, etc.

liotier 11y ago

Energy storage is quickly becoming a critical part of the distribution infrastructure, whose cost should be borne by the unpredictable intermittent producers.

the8472 11y ago

> big problem I can imagine worse problems. Certainly, it's economically suboptimal. We do need storage or some other kind of energy consuming business that can absorb energy that's nearly zero-valued on the spot market. But having so much excess renewable energy that it has to be pushed on other countries - and possibly forces coal plants to throttled back there - is not all bad.

martinald 11y ago
The problem is that when there is so much renewable, the other countries you are pushing it to are very likely to be oversupplied also. Right now the various grid operators pay huge money to get renewable producers to shut off production. This is not ideal.