SamSpade
Well-Known Member
http://www.quora.com/Alternative-En...llow-Germanys-lead-on-promoting-solar-power-1
Some awful statistics before I get into the details:
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.