Germany Runs Up Against the Limits of Renewables

If energy is free or even profitable to consume you'd make money pumping water uphill during the day and using that potential energy later to produce power through conventional hydro-electric means. This is completely insane if you have to pay for power at conventional rates, but we're entering a new era where time of day costs might go all over the place without arbitrage like this to even things out.

Even MIT outlets don't bother to explain why this is a bad thing, just stating that a price is negative is enough to demonstrate there's a problem.

Sounds like they need to encourage EV acquisition so that the extra supply of energy can go to EVs, while the pollution is reduced by taking diesel and petrol cars off the roads. They could also make use of batteries for storage so they can retire coal plants and better handle the variability of energy use.

> The auction system is designed to reduce the rate of new renewable-energy additions and keep Germany from producing too much power. It might seem like an easy way to solve the oversupply issue would be to shut down excess power plants, especially ones that burn coal. But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down. Because German law requires renewable energy to be used first on the German grid, when Germany exports excess electricity to its European neighbors it primarily comes from coal plants. Last fall, the German subsidiary of the Swedish energy giant Vattenfall started up a 1,600-megwatt coal-fired plant that had been under construction for eight years, defying opposition from politicians, environmental organizations, and citizens who want to see coal plants eliminated.

Okay, that's just stupid. This is nothing but a short term problem that could be easily solved with batteries. Anything else seems to be a political problem, not a technical one.

One's (much) filthier than nuclear ( but without the 1950s sci fi horror movie aroma ), the other belongs to Vladimir Putin.

Enjoy. Now don't say fracking,, don't say fracking, don't say fracking....

There are just soo many factors why the 'Energiewende' failed. It's because of the politics made. Eventually we would've running green already but once in a while Angela Merkel just stops a already running process, but then Fukushima happened and she made the decision to go 'all in' into green. But! She didn't actually. Most 'bigger' companies didn't even pay a cent more for the green energy, only the consumers or the main pillar (our middle industry) needed to pay the 'Energiewende'. That was freaking akward since the bigger Companies would've probably paid the biggest pillar of the 'Energiewende'.

The next part is storing energy or producing energy by yourself. Even if you bought a big sun collector you NEED to pay taxes for your energy produced (not just for the collector), also for the energy you will produce and use for your own goods and storing the energy will costs you taxes as well.

While maybe a lot of people can live with that, there was another thing, which is that building energy plants is regulated by our government. If you maybe are a rich guy and want to do something good, you can't since the plants are going through a really painful and akward regulation like a planned economy. Innovation won't win here since the government won't ever shutdown the last coal power plants since there is so much lobby going on when it comes to energy that even if you have a good idea how to solve the last problems (i.e. by innovating into battery grids or some other stuff) you won't succeed. The german government has their own plan, even when they need to raise taxes for all the consumers, they don't even care what happens with the prices on the market since the german consumer market is totally regulated.

> In fact, Germany is giving the rest of the world a lesson in just how much can go wrong when you try to reduce carbon emissions solely by installing lots of wind and solar.

Germany did much more than that. But: the purpose of the Energiewende was not to reduce carbon emissions first. The purpose was to get rid of the nuclear power plants asap. Phasing out coal is the next goal. Getting rid of nuclear had several advantages (for example one can stop early investing even more billions into a failed and costly technology. Nuclear is only provided by large monopolistic utilities, which had to get out of the way. The Energiewende is as much an experiment in getting a much more diverse landscape of energy producers and opening up the huge monopolies for competition from companies of all sizes). Getting rid of coal is also politically difficult, since coal production and usage has a long tradition in Germany and it employed a lot of people and local politicians block closing coal production where they can. But the coal phase out is already starting.

So already the description of the goal of the Energiewende is wrong.

> And in Germany, which is phasing out its nuclear plants, those other plants primarily burn dirty coal.

"Is phasing out." But hasn't yet. There are several nuclear power plants running.

> The country is now the world’s largest solar market. Germany’s carbon emissions in 2014 were 27 percent lower than 1990 levels.

Which is already basically half from US carbon emissions per capita.

> Because fossil-fuel power plants cannot easily ramp down generation in response to excess supply on the grid,

Actually fossil fuel plants can. But those who can are not profitable currently.

> on sunny, windy days there is sometimes so much power in the system that the price goes negativ

That's because there is not enough grid capacity to transport the electricity to South Germany. The grid is being expanded to do so, but this is taking time.

> Germany’s Parliament is expected to soon eliminate the government-set subsidy for renewable energy, known as a feed-in tariff, that has largely fueled the growth in wind and solar.

It is expected that local government in Germany will block this.

> But not only are the coal plants used to even out periods when wind and solar aren’t available, they’re also lucrative and thus politically hard to shut down.

Actually coal power plants in Germany are no longer lucrative and many many of them are losing money. Energy companies are threatening to close those. The mentioned Vattenfall coal power plant is a dinosaur planned long ago. It doesn't fit into the current energy landscape and is a very costly investment which looks like a huge failure.

Doesn't look like the author did its homework...