In general, when politicians promise something will be done by the different set of politicians in office 10+ years in the future, it mostly means "we're not going to do anything right now".
Also, for such a thing to happen, actions need to be undertaken soon ( invest in building new power plants, ramp up the supply chain, etc.). It's not a vague "in ten years we'll do X", it's "in 10 years we'll have X".
It absolutely is. Nothing will happen. I know Germany, I live here.
Just stopping the stopping of renewables will reach the target (for electricity).
You might offset that 6% nuclear that is going away with renewables if you really put your hearts into it, but probably not. Won't be economical.
If you could magically get the angry pixies into all the forthcoming electric cars directly with no waste, sure.
It is very nice milestone that the top line numbers are there already, but way too early to declare victory.
So the point is that transitioning from thermal electricity generation to sources like solar and wind already reduces the primary energy use.
Electrifying traffic further reduces the primary energy use, as 100% of primary energy from gas turn into something like 40% of power which can be used to drive the car forward. An electric engine is a lot more efficient.
This is just math and doesn't yet include efficiency gains through insulation, heat pumps etc.
When you think about it, this is unfairly disadvantaging renewables due to an unfortunate choice of primary energy. For renewables, the primary energy is solar radiation! Suddenly the primary energy of solar panels would go up 5 fold just because of changing the definition of primary energy. Then everyone would be talking how unfair primary energy is to fossil fuels.
If you include the energy used by agriculture (as in: photosynthesis) you will get a number that human energy use is something like 99% powered by the sun.
If you include ambient heat, non-solar energy sources become a rounding error. This may seem obvious and silly, but especially in residential heating using the ambient heat with heat-pumps, solar collectors, large sun-facing triple insulated window fronts, will be key for energy usage reduction.
I would recommend the books by Professor Volker Quaschning (well-known climate scientist in Germany), he goes into lots of stuff like this in detail.
For instance, for Germany to be self sufficient in the winter using electric heating, even if using high efficiency heat pumps, will require massive capex. Likely on the order of 7x all they’ve already spent on their entire electric grid.
A key attribute of those analysis is the interest rates for financing, which used to be near zero - and likely will not be for quite awhile, but good luck predicting that.
It will stay at 0% or go lower. Since when did Germany stop exporting? Since when did Germans stop saving? In fact, it gets easier to save with lower interest rates because it means people don't have to pay interest to the rich. 0% debt is much easier to pay off than debt that is growing exponentially at 10% per year.
I honestly think using interest rates as a throttle is a stupid idea. It would be more logical to introduce a minimum yearly payment to principal ratio and let the central banks control that instead, it would most likely be at 3% during normal times and 6% during inflationary times. Paying interest doesn't reduce the money supply only paying off the principal reduces the money supply and inflation. Raising interest rates is actually an ugly hack to create a recession which then reduces demand for loans. If people borrow anyway, like when a government borrows to service interest, it will actually feed itself and inflation will get worse than if the government lowered interest rates and just paid off the principal to reduce the money supply. When you look at Turkey they are forcibly lowering interest rates but not paying off their debt which is weird as hell, an increased minimum payment would be more effective at removing inflation.
If you take this further and introduce a debt brake or austerity, you will most likely get deflation which then means the interest rate must be negative to avoid a recession.
Interest rates are supposed to cover the lender by compensating them more than they lose by writing the loan (due to things like the time value of the money, inflation losses, etc).
If no one pays interest worth writing the loan for (aka they get more money than they think they would lose at the end) then who is going to write it?
Maybe the gov’t as a policy thing? But ugh. Talk about a recipe for bad loans.
And if Germany writes themselves a bunch of Euro denominated loans for $20 trln worth of electrical equipment and infrastructure that would certainly bottleneck on a few, often foreign manufacturers? Then you’ll see that trade balance get weird quick.
Sure, it's a little late and not enough. But it's a start for now.
Average CDU (conservative) Chancellor Term: 10.4 years - with three of them around the three-term mark.
Average SPD (socialdemocrat, including the current one) Chancellor Term: 6.7 years (not including the current one)
Germany is a conservative country, things take time, actions take decades, and chances are the next, conservative government will gut them (look up what happened to Germany's solar panel industry).
Looking through various targets, it's far better than most countries[0], and Germany might not have the best geography for domestic renewable energy generation other than wind. (Not that it needs to be domestic. Being dependent on Russia for gas was a mistake. Being dependent on France for nuclear or Spain for solar feels a lot safer.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_renewable_energy_tar...
Just go to any rural area in north-west Germany in google maps and look at the solar on the roofs of all the farms.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/26655+Westerstede/@53.2438...
Took me 3 seconds.
... but we used to have a policy that made it profitable to install solar power (Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz).
Also there is a lots of wind in winter and solar works better in summer so the combination works quite well.
Is this even possible? Doesn't it mean that renewable production fluctuates no more than 20%, throughout the whole year? Or, are you talking instantaneously, daytime, ideal conditions? It seems like grid scale storage that could handle these massive fluctuations (like nighttime) are pretty far off.
It would be interesting to see the cost analysis of that vs nuclear.
But even without nuclear I'd think it's viable, albeit expensive. You have to overbuild, add a lot of storage, and interconnect the continent (and maybe northern Africa) with high voltage transmission lines.
Domestically, night time isn't the big deal for Germany. They're 20% wind and only 8.5% solar[0]. They just need to be able to trade their wind output with countries whose wind blows at a different time.
Their geography seems like it would be good for pumped hydro storage, but they only have ~6GW capacity as of 2019[1], so maybe it's not.
[0] https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Economic-Sectors-Enterpris...
I do think it's best for the law to be a broad "this is the target" with the nitty-gritty "how to" being figured out by experts. The target should have been established by asking those experts, but I want the people tasks with implementing it to have flexibility to update the plan if things change.
If a highly-prescriptive law has been passed and suddenly we have a major breakthrough in fusion/batteries/etc., or a geopolitical event suddenly changes the availability of certain resources, the implementation details should be adjusted without having to run back to the politicians for an updated law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source...
Big energy projects of all kinds generally have at least a decade of preparation going into them before they come on-line. For solar and wind, this means everything from building more factories for solar PV and wind turbines, to devising and building better grid distribution systems, to incorporating large-scale storage into the system to account for intermittency.
I'd expect some - actually probably quite a lot - of excess CAPEX on wind+solar, and some deficit (less CAPEX, but buying some electricity at retail) so you don't have electrolysers and thermal plants just lying around.
You're still stuck with the investment issue: either you pay (Hinckley-scale!) fees to providers to just lie around, or the public sector runs it itself, and the "private more efficient" bollocks is exactly that, because the private sector isn't providing the value. The people providing SLAs are.
You need huge amounts of "base load" hydrogen generation capacities for these industries alone. Flexible generation, i.e. produce more to soak up excess renewable energy which you can then export or turn back into electricity (at a huge loss) later, is just the cherry on top.
The initial funding will absolutely come from the steel and chemical industry (and also government subsidies to get the transformation started).
But you still must get a way to put carbon in it. This is usually done by mixing the steel with CO, and the easiest way to get from renewables to CO is by reacting CO2 and H2.
I don't think anybody has enough information to know what is the way to go. But well, I'm an outsider with very little information.
For ammonia this will eventually be required.
Nuclear neat is totally green, you actually get 100% utility out of the plant rather then having constant highly inefficient 'start-stop' operations.
And its actually a better less complex process then electrolysis.
But I guess its much better to absurdly gigantically over-provision renewables so one in a while we can run electrolysers and then by inefficent fossil fuels to drive inefficent electrolysers the rest of the time.
And its not at all clear that hydrogen as storage is actually a good idea, and its also not at all clear its the only thing that scales. It very much unproven at the kind of production scale AND storage scale you suggest. And even in the best case its incredibly inefficient and incredibly expensive make/store/produce.
Something like Iron based batteries will likely turn out to be a better solution.
There's more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline than in a liter of liquid hydrogen.
Electricity to gasoline produces a safe product that is easily storable for years and easily transportable requiring only minor safety precautions. Not something that can be said for hydrogen.
- over provisioning
- geographic distribution
- biomethane
- international grid ties
[0] https://twitter.com/QvistStaffan/status/1427625795355349004?...
Popular ones are:
Refusing to allow energy to be traded with neighbours.
Refusing to allow demand response.
Refusing to allow over building (so the installed capacity exactly matches the yearly required energy and storage needs multiply).
Refusing to target efficiency measures.
Refusing to use existing low carbon power sources (hydro, biogas).
Often they use low volume prices for a massive rollout but at least in this case they're estimating storage capacity rather than price so they won't have done that one.
edit: reading through it now, they cite other people who didn't do the above, and then state that they know some of their choices will overstate things:
> the fact that we model Germany as an island may lead to an overestimation
Guess that bit didn't fit in the tweet.
I don't fully understand this next one, but their headline number is based on running biogas as a constant baseload, which seems utterly ridiculous. They also claim that allowing that to flex with supply and demand has this impact:
> "Adding other sources of flexibility for the example of bioenergy, the duration of period that defines storage requirements lengthens to more than one year."
That's a very strangely worded sentence, with a very counterintuitive plain reading. Are they trying to intentionally confuse people? I'm not sure, can't figure out anything reasonable from the article. How can adding 8GW of flexible biogas generation increase storage requirements? Are they counting the storage of biogas?
1. trades with neighbours: most european countries face similar weather conditions at the same time. The french will need their own nuclear capacity to make up for their own lack of wind.
2. demand response: switching off factories or heating when you need it? That's no solution
3. over building: the problem is that the volatility of wind is massive, if you look at the uk grid website [1], it can go to nearly zero for more than a week. If the volatility was smaller, over provisioning could be a solution (provided the economics work).
4. efficiency measures: you only make the size of the problem slightly smaller, but you still have a volatility problem. And with cars going electric and us not relying on russian gas for heating, I don't see the demand for electricity going down
5. hydro, biogas: there is only so much hydro you can build. And the places where you can build some (Sweden, Norway) leave you at the mercy of a russian submarine cutting the cable. Biogas: isn't that co2 emitting?
EVs and heat pumps are over 4x the efficiency. 75% of your energy just not needed anymore to do the exact same work.
The real clincher is that most of the storage they predict is hydrogen and at the end they calculate that the crazy amount of storage required for Germany as an island is in fact, the same size as the existing gas storage facilities which can be reused for that purpose.
Which I think really rams home how utterly boring this allegedly insurmountable challenge is.
It's a solution for charging the batteries inside your vehicles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_super_grid
Ireland and Britain has massive offshore wind potential that is only being slowly ramped up, for example. Macron has announced a new nuclear reactor building program, so potentially more carbon-free electricity to nuclear-adverse Germany. The massive Danish offshore wind park/energy island has yet to come online but will supply northern Germany.
And if you want to go even more exotic, you could get 24/7/365 renewable energy by piping geothermal to continental Europe from Iceland which has an oversupply. Or even building enormous solar parks in the Sahara (geopolitical risks notwithstanding).
There are plenty of options enabled by geographic distribution of supply without even looking at storage. The main problem is the lack of political will until now, which is changing with the realisation in Germany that Russia isn’t a reliable partner.
Edit: none of these rely on any technical breakthroughs either, merely ramping up the interconnection of grids and renewable sources of electricity.
Couldn't you just burn fossil fuels for those 24 days, and then do atmospheric carbon capture for the other 341?
Even if pulling the carbon out of the air takes 10 times as much energy as was released during those 24 days, that could still be achieved over the course of the year, with a reasonable amount of over provisioning.
In practice, it's far more efficient to capture right when you burn, as each ton of CO2 capture is many times cheaper then.
Is biomethane considered as green? Isn't it like natural gas?
International grid ties basically means you are using coal/nuclear/etc from your neighbours, who will likely have shortage at the same time given they also have their own share of sun and wind.
International grid ties also means:
* When it's cloudy or calm, you can import from somewhere sunny or windy. When it's sunny or windy, export to somewhere cloudy and calm. Shortages a thousand miles southwest aren't going to correlate strongly with shortages where you are, and if you if you have multiple sources a thousand miles in each direction you should be able to balance demand far better. Weather conditions are reasonably local. Demand patterns will also vary a bit.
* You can import solar from somewhere sunnier, or sunny at different. You're not going to transmit your electricity 12,000 miles east/west, but Madrid has sunset an hour later than Berlin, and demand tends to be closer to 7pm than 2am.
Yeah, it's a hard engineering problem, and there will be downsides, but we can do it if we seriously commit to it.
I'm not surprised to see Germany, UK, Norway, Sweden, and Netherlands all be similar, since (I assume) they're all using the North Sea. I am surprised to see Germany's output is so similar to Italy, Portugal, and Greece. It does look like there's a decent separation between places I expect to use the Mediterranean vs. those I'd expect to use the North Sea, but yeah, we likely need a lot of excess capacity, a lot of storage, or a lot of not-wind-or-solar. (Or I guess a lot of flexibility on energy usage.)
I am not convinced there is much diversification. I just did some back of the enveloppe analysis to convince myself. I am using hourly wind electricity production data from this source [1] which is referenced on the europa website [2] (first source I found, I don't necessarily vouch for it). I only looked at 2014-2015 (the last two years of this time series), took the daily production at 2pm (seems to be peak production and peak demand), and then calculated a weekly average of the 2pm production by country for every day. I took the low points for the UK (arbitrarily, that's where I am now), and looked at the percentile of each country for those UK low points.
So the way you read this is for the week ending 28 June 2014, when the UK was at its 1% worst wind production across 2014-2015, at that time Norway was at its 15%th worst production, Sweden 9%th worst, etc. "15%th worst" means that the norwegian production for that week was below that level only 15% of the weeks in 2014-2015.
2014-06-28 2014-09-09 2014-09-16
United Kingdom 1% 1% 2%
Norway 15% 21% 20%
Sweden 9% 0% 11%
Netherlands 1% 19% 18%
France 2% 9% 15%
Germany 23% 1% 41%
Italy 63% 9% 18%
Portugal 32% 5% 60%
Greece 55% 5% 8%
[1] https://zenodo.org/record/4803353 [2] https://data.jrc.ec.europa.eu/dataset/jrc-emhires-wind-gener...
Generally, the biggest issue seems to be heating in the winter. Heat is actually much cheaper to store than electricity. If you have a district heating system, you can even store it seasonally (storing solar heat in the summer) and be competitive with gas, even before the recent price increases.
I think the main reason we don't see a lot of cheapish long term electricity storage yet is that it's not needed. Once we start producing it, economies of scale will kick in. That's at least how it worked for PV, wind turbines, li-ion batteries.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ntsafos/status/148056006004465254...
I'm sorry we can't all be laptop-class software devs, someone has to make the 'stuff'.
Over provisioning one thing just means its not in another place for the first decades.
Instead of kicking it down the road (and systematically destroying renewables) like 16 years of Merkel did, they actually started to accellerate and do immediate packages, this article talks about one that will be accepted before easter.
At least Germany is reasonably stable politically, not quite on the level of China but far better then the revolving door style governments seen in southern Europe.
As if there was an underlying force, something beyond the person in charge, signing laws and making speeches.
Something like, you know a society, that can make things happen (or not).
A modern democracy is not just the ability to change leaders once in a while. It's also the fact that you get a society with clear rules, that empower people to make things happen and empower other people to back the things they like.
If enough Germans are pissed at the situation they let themselves into, they will back attempts to solve this problem, whether they come from some hand-wavy politician or by an utility company offering a green energy plan (even if it costs a bit more)
But the title is misleading, the article talks about how the libertarians (FDP) plan to water down the target from 100% renewables till 2035 to 80%.