German Solar Insanity, Wind InsanityGermany's Green Energy Fiasco
Modern industrial power grids cannot tolerate the huge moment-to-moment energy fluctuations of intermittent unreliable energy sources such as big wind and big solar. Whenever attempting a large scale conversion to "green power," initial economic costs are exorbitant. The cost of the power plants themselves, the cost of new power grid infrastructure, and the huge cost of maintaining spinning backup power sources. And then there is the cost to society as lower and middle income customers strain to pay skyrocketing power bills.
But the real costs of such an ideologically driven, top-down attempt to transform a national power grid and power supply, begin to emerge as the unreliables approach 20% or more of total power capacity to the grid. The violent and unpredictable intermittency of big wind power in particular, leads to power failures -- blackouts, brownouts, selective shutdowns of power customers, etc.
http://alfin2300.blo...re-problem.html
In 2012, solar had a capacity factor of just 11 percent. The capacity factor of German wind was 17 percent. By comparison, fossil-fueled plants can achieve capacity factors of 80 percent or more. And electricity production from Germany’s 12 GW of nuclear capacity in 2012 was 99 TWh, a capacity factor of 94 percent.
Wind and solar can never fully replace nuclear power, because they can’t equal the reliability of nuclear reactors. The main job of the new fossil-fueled plants is not to retire grungy old coal boilers, but to replace nukes with grungy new coal boilers. To see why, we have to consider the distinction between dispatchable and intermittent generators.
“Dispatchable” generators—nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, and biomass— can ramp up and down on command to match their power output with current electricity demand. Unfortunately, wind turbines and photovoltaic panels can’t do that. They generate power when the wind and sun decree, often going dead when electricity is needed and then overproducing when it isn’t. These “intermittent” generators result in “common-mode failure”: night, winter, summer, and passing weather fronts cause swathes of generators to fizzle all at once, for weeks on end, on a continental and even hemispheric scale.
How will a Germany run largely on wind and solar generators survive the long periods when they shut down completely in the dead of winter?
To escape long blackouts many times a year, Germany is planning to back up every gigawatt of wind and solar average capacity with another gigawatt of gas or coal. As it builds its intermittent fleet it will not be able to shut down existing fossil-fueled plants; they will remain in service, complete with staff, maintenance, and overhead expenses and the infrastructure of transmission lines, coal mines, and gas pipelines. And because the dispatchable nuclear generators that could have backed up wind and solar are being shuttered, additional coal and gas plants must be built to take their place—as we see happening now.
http://thebreakthrou...en-energy-bust/
Germany’s Greens help the coal industry, while the US cut emissions by ignoring the greens
The coal industry must be praying for more Green activism:
“IT’S been a black Christmas for green thinkers as Germany, the world leader in rooftop solar and pride of the renewable energy revolution has confirmed its rapid return to coal.
“…new figures show that coal power output in 2013 reached its highest level in more than 20 years.
The stats: Germany is using almost as much coal as it did in 1990:
It’s the dirtiest kind of coal increasing the most
The reason coal is so popular is because coal is cheap and (oh the irony) because of the Green anti-nuclear stance.
China, meanwhile, last year approved new coal production of more than 100 million tons and has plans to add another 860 million tons by 2015.
India is set to follow China, and the IEA says coal is the fossil fuel nearly everybody wants.
http://joannenova.co...ing-the-greens/
Green Dream Turns to Nightmare for German Workers
Let’s call a spade a spade: Germany’s Energy-transition is an unmitigated policy disaster.
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) reported this morning that one in three workers in Germany’s solar industry lost their job last year. By November, there were a mere 4,800 employees left in the sector, the first time in four years that number has fallen below the 5,000-mark. That’s less than half 2012′s levels, when there were still 10,200 solar jobs. These revelations come hard on the heels of news that the $30 billion German taxpayers shuffled into green subsidies last year didn’t actually make the country any cleaner, and that more brown coal was burned there in 2013 than in any year since 1990.
http://www.the-ameri...german-workers/
Edited by stocks, 29 January 2014 - 07:36 AM.
