Solar biggest source of electricity in Germany in June 2019 | Hacker News Reader

Solar biggest source of electricity in Germany in June 2019

reneweconomy.com.au

51 pointsbjoko52 comments

This is a meaningless headline, which follows a regrettably common way of producing misleading statements.

If you look at the article, you'll find that solar generation accounted for only 19% of the total. It's the "biggest source" only as a result of their choice of how to group the other sources. If they had decided to have a "fossil fuel" category, that would have been the biggest. But they decided to split fossil fuels into brown coal, hard coal, oil, and gas, so it doesn't win. Similarly, if they'd split solar into subcategories according to exactly which technology was used, none of them would have been "biggest".

You should similarly ignore misleading statements about "disease X is the biggest killer of Y", and so forth. They're all meaningless when the division into categories is arbitrary.

"Fossil fuel/non-renewables" would not have been the biggest, as you can see in the chart, "renewables" is bigger. Also they didn't split it into those subcategories so that solar wins, this technology split is a absolute standard way to differentiate between technologies which is always used, and it makes no sense (on that level of detail) to not differentiate between lignite, hard coal, gas and oil which all need different power plants, have different costs, different emission factors etc.

Splitting brown coal and hard coal is not standard and would change the result.

It absolutely is standard in germany: German Environment Agency does it this way [0] Fraunhofer Society does it this way [1] German Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy does it this way[2] Agora Energywende (important think tank) does it this way [3] AG Energiebilanzen does it this way [4]

[0] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/bild/strommix-in-deutschland [1] https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... [2] https://www.bmwi.de/Redaktion/DE/Downloads/Energiedaten/ener... [3] https://www.agora-energiewende.de/service/agorameter/chart/p... [4] https://ag-energiebilanzen.de/

Everyone using the same split doesn't make the split non-arbitrary. Aren't small-scale hydro and large-scale hydro rather different things? Is large-scale hydro really "renewable", given that reservoirs fill with sediment, and their creation leads to lots of CO2 being released? Why is nuclear power "non-renewable"? It's renewable on any reasonable time scale, and doesn't produce CO2 during operation. Surely photovoltaic and thermal solar power are rather different technologies?

I have never seen a chart that doesn't split them.

most countries do not run brown coal. at least not as much as they used to.

A safe starting point - I generally assume Reneweconomy.com.au is wrong about everything substantive until it has been reported by someone else. And in this case their insight into the details German energy grid is going to be extremely limited.

That being said, brown coal is a completely different beast from black coal. Gas also has a lot of fundamental differences. If it makes sense to split wind and solar, it makes sense to split brown and black coal.

A key detail; brown coal is not going to appear as an export. If you shut down a brown coal power plant, less coal will be mined. If you shut down a black coal power plant, maybe the coal is still mined and then exported.

Let's not forget that:

- CO2 emissions of Germany is still 5 times more than a comparable (similar GDP/flatness/weather) than France for electricity production [1];

- Electricity production is roughly a third of all final energy and CO2 emissions come mainly from coal and fuel [2]. Two threats for which Germany has done very little for now.

- Germany is spending around 2 billions of dollars [3] for renewable energies, whereas it would have cost more than 50x less with nuclear, allowing to spend the rest of this investment into building insulation and thermal renewable energies.

- PV investments were computed from past market prices, not with the negative price obtained with non controllable source of energy [3]. Germany is only at the beginning of energy subsidies.

Investing in photovoltaics is politically efficient, not environmentally efficient. Please let's stop to focus on renewable electricity. Let's start focusing on carbon-less solutions. The hard problem is about coal and fuel.

The situation could not be more urgent, since conventional oil has reached its peak. Not removing our dependency on oil is strongly damaging for our economies. Focusing on non controllable sources of energy is just accelerating the damages. Please see https://jancovici.com/en/ for more convincing arguments :)

[1] - https://electricitymap.tmrow.co

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption#Energ...

[3] - http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NP_Eye_watering_cost_of_re...

[4] - https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...

Nuclear is far from being cheap. Take a look at the exploding costs at Flamanville [0], Olkiluoto[1], Hinkley Point C[2]. Those 3 Plants alone already cost more than 1/50 of the 2 trillion which you claim would have been sufficient.

Decommissioning of 1990 retired german nuclear powerplant Greifswald is still not even close to being finished.

newly installed PV is far cheaper than nuclear and I'll exclude storage/PtX here as usually when nuclear prices are looked at they also ignore decommissioning costs which are probably way higher than future storage technologies will be.

[0] http://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Weld-repairs-to-delay... [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-finland-nuclear-olkiluoto... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...

It's the economy of scale. Nuclear costs are do to limited production of plants and the strictness of regulations. The costs could be lowered significantly if plants were built at scale. As is almost every plant is one of kind in the west where as China they are cheap because they just crank out the same design that has all the engineering and construction all figured already which is the bulk of construction costs.

"and the strictness of regulations"

Are you saying we should have laxer standards?

economies of scale only work to a certain point. You point to China as an example of doing it right. But China is really just in the same position as the us, but earlier in the process. They’re cranking out nuclear facilities, but are probably equally unprepared to decommission them when the time comes.

Nuclear is a very important technology. It probably doesn’t make sense to scale it up as a solution right now.

This is somewhat true for solar as well but for opposite reasons. Economically, it seems better to perpetually wait as the price and efficiency keep improving. Buying panels now and getting an extra year of service vs waiting a year and getting a better model is often not worth it.

(On the individual scale. There are obviously macro goals that incentivize solar investment now).

Well, in China nobody can tell you where you can stick the radioactive part of your "economy of scale".

Or the reactor facilities themselves, because in China it's relatively easy to use any amount of land, without regard of who owned it before. Then you really don't need to tailor the plants to each location...

AFAIK no democratic country with significant nuclear energy has sufficiently solved the waste storage problem, and it is a very active problem in a lot of countries I know.

Your first two claims are mostly correct.

Your third claim is utterly wrong. And it's 2 trillion, of course, over a period of 20 years, 2011 - 2030, an estimate from 2012 that Siemens made. Let's assume for a second that the (widely debunked) 2 trillion the former Siemens CEO/nuclear lobby president literally pulled out of his ass in 2012 is reality. Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion. Let's assume we tripled the capacity to roughly 35% of total production (from now less than 12%), that's 21 billion a year. So EUR 420 billion over 20 years. So the factor would be 4x for renewables (given the worst estimate published by a guy in 2012 who happened to be the president of the main nuclear lobby group at the time) vs nuclear (the cheapest estimate I could come up). You're an order of magnitude off at least and that is when you believe the Siemens numbers.

Regarding your 4th claim about negative price: wrong conclusion. Negative prices mean an oversupply of generated power. The eventual solution is not to subsidize producers, but to refine the system not to produce such large oversupply in the first place, while still making sure that a sudden drop in supply (because e.g. as a rather blunt example it starts raining and PV output goes down) can be managed.

> Replacing those 2 trillion in renewable with nuclear for USD 40 billion? Germany is spending roughly EUR 10 billion a year on nuclear currently. If we replaced all nuclear stations with with new fancy "cheaper" ones we'd still be at EUR 7 billion.

Working from the very high level, since Germany started shutting down its nuclear plants in the Energiewende (started ~2011) electricity use has apparently cratered by more than 10% per capita [0]. That is evidence that something is going wrong, something so fungible dropping by 10% doesn't scream 'cheaper than the alternatives'. Especially since there isn't really any in-practice data on how expensive solar/wind farms are to maintain over a 20 year timeframe so we don't know what the costs will look like after the capital expenditure is done (hopefully very cheap, I'm not casting aspersions - just there isn't a lot of data for how grids go when they rely on these technologies).

We're still early days, so maybe you are spot on and just didn't feel like including sources, but there is not yet clarity on whether the money spent on renewables has been a true like-for-like replacement for the nuclear it replaced. The trends are big, slow moving and well underway though. The experiment in energy transitioning remains very interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Germany

Electricity use is dropping for a variety of reasons, not least deindustrialisation.

Here's a chart for the UK, it shows the same trend. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...

And in the UK that also started happening at about the time they deemphasised nuclear (and fossil fuels, wow!) and started to roll out serious wind power [0]. This isn't compelling evidence that renewables are the more cost effective option - we know nuclear was cost effective at some point, it got to 10% of worlds energy largely through market forces.

I'm not sure what 'deindustrialising' means to you, but it sounds pretty scary to me. Those numbers are like not having electricity on Sundays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:UK_electricity_production...

You mean the market forces comprised of massive government subsidies and underestimated decommissioning and accident costs?

"'deindustrialising'"

Heavy industry moving abroad, mainly to china.

There's another variable in the mix. North sea gas running out. The UK has gone from basically being self sufficient in gas to importing most of it. I think you need to tease that out as well before you can definitively say its renewables pushing up the price.

I would also point out that Hinckley point C guaranteed prices are more expensive than the latest wind prices.

And I would finally point out that my 100% renewable electricity tariff was cheaper than the none renewable alternatives, and one of the biggest electricity companies has announced its going 100% renewable electricity, with no price increase to customers. Both of which seem to argue against renewable electricity being that much more expensive.

A good reason for the drop of electricity use is the increasing price of electricity due to fuel increasing prices for extractions + investments in renewable energies

I am not pretending to have exact numbers but we should have some orders of magnitude in our heads.

Let's pretend that our electricity is running fully in nuclear wrt. fully in wind turbines/PV: load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4, life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3), nuclear does not require a new electric grid, whereas renewable energies does (cost ~x1.5), nuclear works better with a low storage (10%) whereas PV/WT want 50-60% of storage (cost x2-4) and cost of building/recycling for a kwh is around 3-5k€ against 1-1.5k€ for WT (idk for PV) (cost %2-4). At the end of the day, the capex/kWh is indeed one order of magnitude higher for WT/PV than for nuclear. I am not pretending those numbers are exact but I think it reflects the order of magnitude.

For the 4th claim, the issue is that prices are much lower that what they were supposed to be, and that is why, the field will need to be heavily subsidized for a long term.

What I support, it is not to globally spending less money into energy transition. I really hope governments will spend much more than nowadays. But, I just hope we focus on reducing our economical dependency on fuels/coals to preserve a bit of our current comfort while not killing every year several millions of people with fine particles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents).

Give me USD 2 trillions, and I will 1) ban coal generated electricity, 2) ban any vehicles that consume more than 2L/100 km, 3) insulate any existing buildings (and not only new buildings as our policy makers do, since old buildings stay for roughly 100 years), 4) subsidy heavily heat pomp. But I will certainly not close any nuclear power plants.

I know it is almost impossible to ask such requests to Europeans, but this is the only plausible solutions I have heard of.

a nuclear site would never be cheaper than solar energy. I mean in the next 20-40 years it might have been cheaper. unfortunatly the site needs to be cleaned up in a process that costs multiple billions of euro and the storage for the factory is still not ready for the next thousands of years and is also really costly in germany.

in germany solar energy has two problems:

- trash (there is no long term storage and there probably will never be one that can sustain 1000+ years)

- cleanup of land (germany is small and has a lot of people we need to use our space without wasting it)

>load factor is around 0.7/0.8 (against 0.2) so costs increase by x3-4

This is a double-red herring. First load factors do not correlate with cost, and second comparing the load factor of a nuclear power plant to a PV system is comparing apples with... not even oranges... more like comparing apples with seahorses. The interesting number would be: how much money did I have to put into that thing divided by how much MWh can I get out of a thing.

>life expectancy is 60-80 y against 20-30 years (x2-3)

Next red herring. If I buy a pair of shoes that last me 10 years but costs 200 bucks, that's 20 bucks/year. If I buy a pair of shoes that costs me 10 bucks and lasts one year, well, 10 bucks/year. Recycling/trashing a pair of shoes adds another 5 EUR/pair, so the cheap pair is 15/year and the expensive one is 20.5 EUR/year. The 10x higher life expectancy by itself does not mean shit to the annual cost.

The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) for nuclear in France (who are supposed to be doing nuclear really well) was 50 EUR/MWh in 2017, but that's with the state covering the insurance costs already, which are huge, so a massive hidden-in-plain-sight subsidy. (France EDF and IEA calculations). The Hinkley Point C project in the UK is about 100 EUR/MWh, which the state had to guarantee the operators, or else the operators would have dropped the entire project, probably because their analysts told them that the chances that their plant will be competitive on price over it's lifetime are slim to none.

On top of that, a longer life expectancy means a longer commitment, which can work in your favor, or against you.

The LCOE in 2018 for large-scale PV in Germany was 37-63 EUR/MWh. Onshore Wind 40-82, Offshore 75-138 (Fraunhofer). Prices are still dropping rapidly as both the technology and construction/maintenance requirements and processes improve, actually dropping, not just "estimated" drops. Prices for nuclear are said to drop too with new fancy technology, maybe... the nuclear lobby said... but so far that's pure speculation and e.g. the fancy EPR-type nuclear plants in France/UK for now actually do not show lower costs.

The US has PV at roughly 75 USD/MWh, and nuclear at roughly 96 USD/MWh.

I'd call the PV/Wind LCOE at the very least "competitive" to the LCOE of nuclear, sometimes already cheaper, and otherwise estimated to be cheaper soon.

Now, you got a point that switching to renewables requires additional and/or refined infrastructure, like changes to the power grid, energy storage/backup power plants, etc. which requires quite a bit of additional research and investment.

I think there is a misunderstanding in my calculation. If one pair of shoes last 3 times longer, then you investment is divided by 3. The same for load factor. If you use your shoes one every 2 days, you need to buy 2 times more shoes.

You are not comparing the load factor of shoe A against the load factor of shoe B. We are comparing the load factor of shoe A against the load factor of teaspoon B... which doesn't make much sense.

And even if you compared shoe A against shoe B, you'd still have to factor in load initial and maintenance cost (and a bunch of other things). Sure, shoe A might have have a 3x better load factor, but the manufacturer of shoe A also wants 10x the money compared to shoe B.

That's why I referred to the LCOE because it is a good estimation of what a MWh of actual (not nameplate) output will cost you. It already includes all the tricky bits like initial investment, operation and maintenance cost incl fuel where needed, load factors, disposal, life expectancy and even stuff like carbon taxes (where applicable).

So here is an amended (increasingly silly) shoe example, now with load factors:

If I buy a pair of shoes that I can wear every day (factor 1.0) that last me 10 years but costs 400 bucks, that's 40 bucks/year. If I buy a pair of shoes that costs me 10 bucks, but that I can only wear every other day (factor 0.5) and lasts one year, well, 20 bucks/year because I need two pairs to have something to wear every day. Recycling/trashing a pair of shoes adds another 5 EUR/pair, so the cheap pairs are 30/year and the expensive one is 40 EUR/year. The 10x higher life expectancy by itself does not mean shit to the annual cost, and the higher "load factor" I can get from the more expensive shoe model by itself doesn't mean shit either.

Lets also not forget that this was the warmest June since measurements began[1] and that the temperatures were accompanied by a lot of sun.

[1](german) https://www.wetter.com/videos/kolumnen/juni-2019-bricht-reko...

Nuclear power is indeed quite cheap, especially if the operators have to pay neither insurance nor damages for the potentially catastrophic consequences of accidents. And most operators have totally understated/underestimated the cost of demolishing plants at the end of their lifetime.

In Germany in particular, the biggest actual problem would be waste storage. We just don't really know were to put it, and even if we knew we couldn't agree where.

So, in the meantime, until we know with absolute certainty what to do with it (so please no pie-in-the sky reclamation ideas or unproven reactor types nobody can build commercially), I prefer not piling up more of that stuff.

Compared to the CO2 from burning coal, which we know what it does and we also don't have a great solution for, and the fact that mining coal is also dangerous/not risk free?

I'd also love an ideal world without nuclear or fossil fuels, but that doesn't make it real.

Yup. Fuels + coals are directly killing a few millions per year because the storage is the atmosphere. There is no green source of energy, but some sources (hydro, nuclear, renewables) are several orders of magnitude more letals than other sources, whereas some sources are several orders of magnitude cheaper than renewable energies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents)

That comparison is useless and misleading. It's still a fact that people don't want radioactive waste stored in their vicinity, and in democratic countries they can and will prevent such storage indefinitely. And who can really blame them? The stuff is undeniably lethal and scary.

There seems to be a majority of people who don't really trust a theoretical, probabilistic safety when the downside risk is this catastrophic. And on top of that, lots of "impossible" accidents have happened, further eroding public trust in theoretical safety.

Are you serious? That 2 trillion dollar estimate is including decommissioning costs of nuclear power plants which have to be paid even if you replace old nuclear power plants with new ones. Suddenly "50x less" turns into at most 7x less and we haven't even paid for the construction cost of a single nuclear plant yet. 50x less is 40 billion which barely covers the cost of a single reactor.

Seems like installations doubled in 2018 compared to the last few years [0]. That surprised me a bit, since, while there still are gov incentives, they only seem to go down after the big push ended around 2012. So that bump is likely caused by falling cost. That's great to see.

[0] https://energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annu...

My friends in Germany still have the most expensive electricity in all of Europe, including Scandinavia.

They should have stayed on nuclear until renewable would be cheaper since the households are the ones feeling the pinch while big corps negociate lower fees or import cheaper electricity from France that's big on nuclear.

It's cool to be ECO and all but that's just taking the piss on the middle class and my priority is putting food on the table for my family not footing the bill for political-corporate ECO circle jerk.

Household of 3 people in one of the most expensive cities in Germany here, with multiple Raspberry Pis, a laptop and a small server running 24/7. We are not actively doing anything to save energy. We pay between 20 and 30 EUR per month for electricity. The average net income per household in Germany is 3314 EUR per month [0], so this is less than 1% of the average household income. I would not call that expensive. Regardless of the cost, it will especially not prevent you from putting food on the table of your family, because if you have problems to do that, social security will pay the bill for you.

[0] https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/datenreport-2018/private-hau...

This is hard to believe. I'm paying more than that for a household of 1. For 3 ppl, the typical comparison platforms quote EUR 900 p.a. as the cheapest option (3,500kWh estimate). At EUR 360,- a year, you'd get a mere 1000kWh which hardly supplies a fridge, lighting and cooking every now and then. The average price in Germany is close to 30ct per kWh, plus some kind of fixed base fee...

Why is that hard to believe? I just checked my bill. Last year, we consumed 1,402 kWh, which came down to around 33 EUR per month (a bit higher than my number above, which was the cost in 2017). We cook at least 6 days per week. Our washing machine is a cheap model from 2015.

The third person in our household is a little child, so we are more in the 2 persons range. But even for 2 persons, Google states as the average 3,000 kWh, which I find hard to believe. Even if we tried, I just cannot think of anything we could do to consume even more electricity.

> 1,402 kWh, 33 EUR per month

no way. not even close. 1400 is never ever 33 euro not even in the east side of germany.

33 per month is 396 per year, even in Stuttgart (random not-cheap-to-live place I just plugged into a price search) you can get 1400 kWh for ~420, so I'd not be so certain ~ 5% lower isn't possible elsewhere.

This translates to 0.285 EUR/kWh, with 0.30 EUR/kWh being the current average in Germany, according to Google.

he said he pays that monthly. unfortunatly all electricity provider have a base price. also 0.30eur/kWh is the lower bracket in west germany (not the average). and for more than 1 person 1400 kWh also seems a little bit off, too. Ok granted maybe he is roughly at 1800, but 1400 is like having a fridge+washing machine (every 3 days)+cooking (every second day)+led lamps for like 4 hour per evening.

In turn, I find the typical comparison platform estimate hard to believe. I live in a 2-person household and we need roughly 1000kWh/a without really caring for it. The platforms estimate 2500kWh/a.

Even with an extra freezer and a dishwashing machine we wouldn't come even close to the "estimated" value. Also: We pay about 0.25Eur/kWh. The 30-40Eur/mo is also true for us.

1000kwh/pa sounds reasonable.

My household averages about that and we have 2 fridges and 2 freezers and electric oven. Hob, hot water and central heating are gas though.

I spent less than 1000KWh last year when I was living alone. Had one fridge, and cooked most of my meals. The washing machine was building owned and heating/hot water was building provided via gas heating.

Thing is, they do it so that renewables become cheaper. Someone has to deploy them at scale so the learning curve gets the price down. It won't happen by itself.

....brought to you by taxes /subsidies: "Taxes and fees now amount to 52 percent of the monthly power bill for retail consumers....The renewable energy levy alone adds 18 euros to the average monthly bill." https://www.dw.com/en/german-electricity-price-is-half-taxes...

So? We heavily subsidize every energy source here in Germany, having done that since forever. Coal subsidies, nuclear subsidies (incl massive hidden, defacto ones), now renewables. If there were no subsidies the price would be in the same ballpark anyway, except the state would have no influence over where that money gets spent.

The "renewables levy" isn't meant to be permanent high at the same level. It is meant to be seed money for research and initial construction to get the ball rolling. Startup money basically. It works by guaranteeing companies a minimum price for renewable power to reduce their investment risk.

but the green energy subsidy (EEG) fee is ridiculously distributed. Anyone in the industry who really needs a lot of electricity doesn't have to pay it at all while it makes up 20-25% of the price for citizens.

I can see that they don't want to scare off these companies but the way it works now is not good.

fossil fuels are also heavily subsidized

That's how it should be. The fact that the voters overwhelmingly voted for the green party during the EU vote despite the high electricity costs shows that supporting renewables is a priority for German citizens.

>>The fact that the voters overwhelmingly voted for the green party during the EU vote despite the high electricity costs shows that supporting renewables is a priority for German citizens.

Germans and voting...not a good argument, I'll leave it at that.

Please do not post nationalistic swipes to Hacker News.

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