Solar Not Working Out for Germany

[SamSpade]

http://www.quora.com/Alternative-En...llow-Germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power-1

Some awful statistics before I get into the details:

• Germany is widely considered the global leader in solar power, with over a third of the world's nameplate (peak) solar power capacity. [1] Germany has over twice as much solar capacity per capita as sunny, subsidy-rich, high-energy-cost California. (That doesn't sound bad, but keep going.)
• Germany's residential electricity cost is about $0.34/kWh, one of the highest rates in the world. About $0.07/kWh goes directly to subsidizing renewables, which is actually higher than the wholesale electricity price in Europe. (This means they could simply buy zero-carbon power from France and Denmark for less than they spend to subsidize their own.) More than 300,000 households per year are seeing their electricity shut off because they cannot afford the bills. Many people are blaming high residential prices on business exemptions, but eliminating them would save households less than 1 euro per month on average. Billing rates are predicted by the government to rise another 40% by 2020. [2]
• Germany's utilities and taxpayers are losing vast sums of money due to excessive feed-in tariffs and grid management problems. The environment minister says the cost will be one trillion euros (~$1.35 trillion) over the next two decades if the program is not radically scaled back. This doesn't even include the hundreds of billions it has already cost to date. [3] Siemens, a major supplier of renewable energy equipment, estimated in 2011 that the direct lifetime cost of Energiewende through 2050 will be $4.5 trillion, which means it will cost about 2.5% of Germany's GDP for 50 years straight. [4] That doesn't include economic damage from high energy prices, which is difficult to quantify but appears to be significant.
• Here's the truly dismaying part: the latest numbers show Germany's carbon output and global warming impact is actually increasing[5] despite flat economic output and declining population, because of ill-planned "renewables first" market mechanisms. This regime is paradoxically forcing the growth of dirty coal power. Photovoltaic solar has a fundamental flaw for large-scale generation in the absence of electricity storage -- it only works for about 5-10 hours a day. Electricity must be produced at the exact same time it's used. [29] The more daytime summer solar capacity Germany builds, the more coal power they need for nights and winters as cleaner power sources are forced offline. [6] This happens because excessive daytime solar power production makes base-load nuclear plants impossible to operate, and makes load-following natural gas plants uneconomical to run. Large-scale PV solar power is unmanageable without equally-large-scale grid storage, but even pumped-storage hydroelectricity facilities are being driven out of business by the severe grid fluctuations. They can't run steadily enough to operate at a profit. [2,7] Coal is the only non-subsidized power source that doesn't hemorrhage money now. [8] The result is that utilities must choose between coal, blackouts, or bankruptcy. Which means much more pollution.

(It's pretty long - the part I pasted is just the beginning).

 

[GURPS]

Sad really, but I

1) to laugh @ Germany for being so stupid
2) Cringe because tree huggers / Enviro-Fascits want to do the same thing here ....



only in our case, Obama wants to shut down the Coal Plants

 

[Larry Gude]

"Germany's residential electricity cost is about $0.34/kWh, one of the highest rates in the world. About $0.07/kWh goes directly to subsidizing renewables, which is actually higher than the wholesale electricity price in Europe. (This means they could simply buy zero-carbon power from France and Denmark for less than they spend to subsidize their own)."

Ah, the beauty of subsidized markets....

For those of you who don't know what you pay for juice, you're probably paying about $.13 a kw/h so, if you spend $100 a month, you'd be paying nearly triple that.

 

[Gilligan]

Sure..we can point and laugh now....but our own moronic government (fed and state both) is pushing ahead to build offshore windpower "plants" and the amortized (effective) cost of power generation for those is 3 to 4 times that of a typical coal or NG plant.

 

[Larry Gude]

Sure..we can point and laugh now....but our own moronic government (fed and state both) is pushing ahead to build offshore windpower "plants" and the amortized (effective) cost of power generation for those is 3 to 4 times that of a typical coal or NG plant.

Who is pointing and laughing? I assume we all see this is where we are headed. Absent Germany's efficiencies and cooperation as an economy.

 

[Hessian]

When I was in Germany with the relatives,...I was mildly amused at all the concern for global warming (2007?). The stories in the news, scientific studies on ocean levels, etc. I could not figure out their fascination. They were building wind farms throughout the north--over all their farmland. I suspect there is a deep seated fear of dependence on imports being cut off.(like 2 wars and throughout the division of the cold war.) So, they overpay for electricity to save the environment AND prevent dependence. Meanwhile, their eastern neighbors (less developed due to Soviet hegemony) are still putzing along with 50 year old tech. For the German Economy which has been the boast of Europe,..this is a bit embarrassing!

 

[Larry Gude]

When I was in Germany with the relatives,...I was mildly amused at all the concern for global warming (2007?). The stories in the news, scientific studies on ocean levels, etc. I could not figure out their fascination. They were building wind farms throughout the north--over all their farmland. I suspect there is a deep seated fear of dependence on imports being cut off.(like 2 wars and throughout the division of the cold war.) So, they overpay for electricity to save the environment AND prevent dependence. Meanwhile, their eastern neighbors (less developed due to Soviet hegemony) are still putzing along with 50 year old tech. For the German Economy which has been the boast of Europe,..this is a bit embarrassing!

For all their pluses, Germans do have that thing about following when maybe they ought not...

 

[Gilligan]

Who is pointing and laughing? I assume we all see this is where we are headed.

I know you you don't really assume that.

 

[Larry Gude]

I know you you don't really assume that.

Hope?

 

[SamSpade]

For all their pluses, Germans do have that thing about following when maybe they ought not...

During the protests back in '89, the East Germans would go to the Nikolaikirche for the demonstration in massive crowds -

But going there, they would ALL walk on the right side, crammed together rather than just walk on either side of the line - because you're not supposed to walk in that direction on that side.

How good it is to know they're not this way anymore!

 

[Toxick]

2) Cringe because tree huggers / Enviro-Fascits want to do the same thing here ....

It's not just treehuggers and enviro-fascists who want to do that here.

I, for one, would love to see solar power become our primary source of energy. It's clean; it's virtually inexhaustible; fuel is free to harness, and therefore it would (theoretically) be cheap to access. (Although I'm sure in our corporate and crony-capitalism driven system, they'll manage to #### it all up and make it burdensome, see also: Solyndra).




It's too bad the environmental lobby and hosed-up initiatives have managed to make the words "solar power" immediately throw up red-flags every time it's mentioned.

 

[glhs837]

It's not just treehuggers and enviro-fascists who want to do that here.

I, for one, would love to see solar power become our primary source of energy. It's clean; it's virtually inexhaustible; fuel is free to harness, and therefore it would (theoretically) be cheap to access. (Although I'm sure in our corporate and crony-capitalism driven system, they'll manage to #### it all up and make it burdensome, see also: Solyndra).




It's too bad the environmental lobby and hosed-up initiatives have managed to make the words "solar power" immediately throw up red-flags every time it's mentioned.

But for most places, there's just not enough of it coming down from the sky to make it economical. It's not that people hate solar, we just don't like inefficient crap being foisted off a a valid solution when it's not.

 

[Larry Gude]

It's not just treehuggers and enviro-fascists who want to do that here.

I, for one, would love to see solar power become our primary source of energy. It's clean; it's virtually inexhaustible; fuel is free to harness, and therefore it would (theoretically) be cheap to access. (Although I'm sure in our corporate and crony-capitalism driven system, they'll manage to #### it all up and make it burdensome, see also: Solyndra).


It's too bad the environmental lobby and hosed-up initiatives have managed to make the words "solar power" immediately throw up red-flags every time it's mentioned.

Oil is liquid sunshine.

So is nuke.

With solar as you mean it, the issue becomes that of storage, which is what oil is; stored solar energy. So, anything we do, batteries, some genius idea for storing all that sunshine, that's all well and good but, we're still talking about something that would need to pack one hell of a wallop in some sort of manageable, reliable, economically feasible package.

 

[SamSpade]

But for most places, there's just not enough of it coming down from the sky to make it economical. It's not that people hate solar, we just don't like inefficient crap being foisted off a a valid solution when it's not.

Actually, there is - but the technology still isn't there to make it useful enough. We only turn around a small portion of the solar energy into electricity. An overwhelming amount is wasted.
When we can make panels that convert a LOT more solar into electricity - and cheap enough - we'll see a solar world. It just ain't here yet.

 

[PeoplesElbow]

Actually, there is - but the technology still isn't there to make it useful enough. We only turn around a small portion of the solar energy into electricity. An overwhelming amount is wasted.
When we can make panels that convert a LOT more solar into electricity - and cheap enough - we'll see a solar world. It just ain't here yet.

A better use of the sun would be to make steam to turn a turbine in a power plant that was also natural gas capable, when the sun goes out or its raining etc the natural gas powers the turbines and the output is constant unlike photovoltic cells.

 

[glhs837]

Actually, there is - but the technology still isn't there to make it useful enough. We only turn around a small portion of the solar energy into electricity. An overwhelming amount is wasted.
When we can make panels that convert a LOT more solar into electricity - and cheap enough - we'll see a solar world. It just ain't here yet.

I should have quailed my statement, agreed. I think we might see a fusion breakthrough before we'll see a breakthrough in the solar conversion process.