> Because the state couldn’t fund a massive energy programme alone, it ran a series of clean power auctions, where it offered project developers 20-year contracts to sell electricity into the national grid at guaranteed rates.
This is a carbon copy of what Germany did prior to the infamous "Altmaier-Knick" and "Gabriel-Tief [1], both named after the utterly incompetent ministers responsible for cutting back on these programs. Prior to that, our solar industry was world leading in competence and production capacity, it all shifted to China afterwards.
As a Spaniard myself that have lived in several cities in Germany like Hamburg, I will tell you a secret: There is no sun in Germany. My eyes have to adapt to the luminosity change every time I go to southern Europe or north of Africa.
I have always believed that putting solar panels in Germany was a wrong solution.
I have also lived in Argentina and travelled to Uruguay. Those countries have a massive amount of natural resources compared with Germany for a population that is much smaller.
Your personal impression doesn't really matter though. What matters is the statistics.
Of course there is sun in Germany. Yes, there's less. But then it's also cooler which makes the solar panels more efficient. What matters is if it's economical to use solar panels there, which it is. In summer, where some areas will use quite a bit of AC, there's more daylight hours than regions further south. In winter, if you have vertically mounted panels, a nice effect you can get is that the snow reflects extra sunlight from the ground to the solar panel.
Fun fact, even the airport in Longyearbyen in Svalbard, Norway - an island close to the north pole - has solar panels. They're mounted vertically on the walls, since the sun is never very high in the sky. There's no sun at all in winter, but in summer there's sun 24/7.
It's surprising how much production they get even that far north: "the PV system produces as much as 70 percent of what is typically produced in Germany"
So please don't use your subjective impression about how bright you feel it is to gauge the viability of solar. I can tell you from personal experience, it's not very bright in Svalbard even in summer.
BTW, much of the energy need in winter in northern climates is for heating. It's surprisingly effective to store thermal energy over several months. So it's actually viable to dump heat from excess solar in a thermal reservoir in summer, and use that heat in winter.
> It's surprisingly effective to store thermal energy over several months.
And how much would you need? Have you done the maths on this? I did. There are plenty of times in e.g. November when neither wind nor solar are good for much (production drops to like 1-2% of the average). That goes on for weeks. Just trying to compensate those losses for two weeks for the current amount of wind and solar Germany has, takes > 10 TWh of storage. How much thermal storage do you think would we need to build to get that?
I made those calculations to get an idea how much storage we would need to be able to finally shut down power stations running on coal or gas. I was quite shocked about the number.
Whenever someone points out the realities of things some people are quick to counter with some utopian ideas, but usually they don't do the math on it. I encourage you to always make a calculation, at least on a napkin, to get an idea of the magnitude of what would be required.
Your comment reads like it would be as easy as the flick of a wrist because something "is surprisingly effective". It's not. It takes the amount of many, many Stuttgart 21s in dedication, costs and time.
> There are plenty of times in e.g. November when neither wind nor solar are good for much (production drops to like 1-2% of the average). That goes on for weeks.
So what. Either overbuild solar and wind to a degree that even with reduced generation capacity needs can still be met and use the over-generation in summer to produce hydrogen, e-fuels for air and maritime or whatever, or run the capacity of the storage until it's depleted and use gas peakers for the 2-4 weeks in the year where nothing else can fill the demand.
Please have a thorough look at https://www.smard.de and download their data to do some statistics on it. This should give you an impression of what, when and how long is missing. Hint: It's not just two to three weeks per year. There are many such gaps. And they're not just a couple of days long.
All your ideas hinge on storage that somehow magically comes to existence. I told you the numbers and you then argue with science fiction. No one knows how to build a reliable hydrogen network of the size that would be necessary. The efficiencies for generation are abysmal, especially if you try to generate just from water and electricity and not from natural gas. I don't believe you even remotely grasp the magnitude of the challenges ahead.
Again, I would like to encourage the use of real data and math. Less science fiction and wishful thinking.
Cool, so you would only need about 120 of those to compensate Germany's current wind and solar power in the gaps without wind and sun. That's just 1.3 billion Euros. That's better than the last time I checked out heat storage. Then it was 100MWh for roughly a football stadium sized area with subterranean sand.
Germany had to return 19 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 7.3 GW to the electricity market simply because neither wind nor solar provide dispatchable power and hence can never replace conventional power plants. They just help saving fuel.
Germany was facing the cutoff from russian gas, which had provided more than half of its gas imports, and was also in the process of shutting down its last nuclear reactors.
To suggest that the return of those coal power plants was due to renewables underdelivering, seems to be misleading at best.
Personally, that whole fiasco served as a reminder of the dangers of fossil fuel imports from undemocratic states.
> To suggest that the return of those coal power plants was due to renewables underdelivering, seems to be misleading at best
If that money was invested into nuclear power plants and not into failed Energirwende then there would be no need for that and no fear of Russian cut offs
however with a 5kw array, and a 13kwh battery, we are self sufficient for at least 6 months of the year (as in 0kw from grid) and at worst 40% in the midst of winter. Today I have generated 10kwhr and its only 14:00.
Germany should have no real issues with solar production. I mean its not great, but its not anywhere near as bad as you imply.
yes, but panels can be made cheap enough and there is plenty of surfaces you can plaster them on. To just put them on roofs was very much the right choice compared to say Desertec.
When you look into it then Desertec would have been a huge waste of resources. The issue at this point is not generation - its storage and to a lesser degree transport.
You can kind of tell when it's sunny or windy in European countries.
If it's windy renewables skeptics will tell you how little power is being generated right now by solar panels.
If it's sunny renewables skeptics will tell you how little power is generated by wind turbines right now.
This is partly because skeptics are gonna skeptic but also it's also because sun and wind anticorrelate way more than most people think, reducing storage requirements down to quite reasonable levels (such that pumped storage/hydrogen can economically satisfy most grids).
He threw shade on it but without a good reason as the reply to him points out.
Rescaling existing production is exactly how to demonstrate whether the peaks and lulls of solar and wind would sufficiently line up in a 100% solar/wind/pumped storage/hydrogen storage grid. Real data > hypothesized data.
What's absurd is the fossil fuel/nuclear lobby's "for public consumption" models that assume that the sun and wind both go out for 4 weeks at a time every winter and that the only way to store energy is with lithium batteries from 2012.
I have no horse in this race but just wanted to point out the absurdity of this methodology:
“The generation data for wind, rooftop and utility solar data was rescaled to supply ~60%, 25% and 20% of demand respectively over the year. For example, over the last year utility solar generation has met 5% of demand. The target for utility solar was 20%, so I rescaled the last 7 days of utility solar data by 4x (ie, 20% divided by 5%).”
That's a perfectly sensible methodology, do you have a specific problem with it?
"Wind and Solar are fine as long as they're only X% of the grid, but you'd need <silly amount> of storage for lulls in wind and sun once they get close to 100%" is the question it's answering.
That's not due to incompetent politicians for once. The crisis of the German car industry is entirely of its own doing - they completely ignored electric power for years, and instead focused on lobbying to get rid of emission limits, which obviously left them stranded in a ditch after Dieselgate. On top of that, everyone but Volkswagen was/is focused on high-margin SUVs and luxury vehicles, which aren't really a thing outside of corporate "luxury" for upper level management and new-rich in China, and Volkswagen completely dropped the ball in software quality.
That’s only part of it (China is eating and will continue Germany’s EV’s lunch), the other part is energy prices. Like it or not, cheap natural gas from a certain country was the backbone of a competitive German industrial economy. Can’t make an Bosch appliance or VW with solar power that can compete with Korea’s LG or Chinese brands. Energy is EVERYTHING.
The Zoe is EOL and IIRC replaced by the Clio E-Tech. Also, Renault is french?
(Not to talk badly about the specific car or the move to BEV in general - I applaud that and am at the same time disappointed how our [German] manufacturers ignored the shift)
Even in Europe cars are becoming bloated and shoving everyone else off the streets. The Economist had a piece about the death of small cars in Europe a few months ago. https://archive.ph/KxzUK
»This is a carbon copy of what Germany did prior to the infamous "Altmaier-Knick" and "Gabriel-Tief [1], both named after the utterly incompetent ministers responsible for cutting back on these programs.«
Germany installed more wind and solar capacity per capita than any other country in the western world.
Besides that, if an economic program heavily relies on subsidies, it’s not sustainable in the first place.
Yes, if your only concerns are the %age of renewables in the electricity mix and the health of an industry that could only continue to exist with direct subsidies it was incompetent.
Personally, I think the Energiewende is one of the most expensive failures ever. It cost about €500 billion in direct subsidies and indirect damage in the trillions due to lower economic growth. Not to mention the waste that was the installation of solar panels and wind turbines that were less efficient and became uneconomical to even upkeep.
And what was gained by this sacrifice? Today solar is the cheapest form of energy generation to build (even with storage and even in Sweden) and we got exactly nothing for being first.
Imagine if the Energiewende was a framework of laws and some light subsidies that allowed for an actually decentralized energy market. You sell your 10kW solar installation's power to your local farmer while you're at work and he sells you the power from his combo natgas and biogas reactor at night. All proceeds from this tax-free with no bureaucratic BS and guaranteed access to your local grid. Pretty soon there would have been small towns that were net exporters and the system would be extremely resilient.
Instead, because of lobbying by the privatized monopoly companies but mainly because politicians are allergic to self-orgazing and self-regulating systems (they cannot imagine them and they resent that they don't need their involvement) we got high prices, centralized and fragile generation, communities opposed to wind turbines because they did not see any benefits.
Strong claims? So you want proof that an increase in the price of energy, which is an input into absolutely every good and service, causes less goods and services to be produced? I don't think we have a basis for discussion here.
This is a carbon copy of what Germany did prior to the infamous "Altmaier-Knick" and "Gabriel-Tief [1], both named after the utterly incompetent ministers responsible for cutting back on these programs. Prior to that, our solar industry was world leading in competence and production capacity, it all shifted to China afterwards.
[1] https://www.fraunhofer.de/de/forschung/aktuelles-aus-der-for...