Germany to Introduce Bill to Accelerate Wind Energy Expansion
pmtoday.co.uk
pmtoday.co.uk
Edit: what's with the downvotes? A URL is not an argument, and neither is some raw data without any interpretation.
Even if a plot is not perfect, consistent wind (well above the ground) can be tapped by tall wind turbines and still be net positive. Ground wind speed is very different from up where they operate
Quiet .. theres insufficient wind here (aerial not at ground level or behind lederhosen) in southern Germany.. maybe we shouldn't invest millions into it
Data .. lack of wind in southern Germany on website dedicated to tracking wind in Europe
Can't blame them though, a landscape filled with wind farms is hardly enticing.
Of course there's also access and wiring.
Wind farms are large scale, long term, industrial sites. There are not forests or fields...
Covering a country in wind farms (which is literally what's needed to get decent reliable-ish production) is all downsides with a single upside: electricity is renewable with no emissions. Very far from being ideal or even a first choice.
Well, at least you're acknowledging that this is political and ideological, which is always a hindrance on these issues.
Nuclear would be a good option.
In term of wind, I think offshore wind is much preferable to on-land wind, but I suspect that Germany is also limited there.
As an example for that "10+ years" timescale, you can look at our direct neighbor France: They are now starting the planning phase on new nuclear reactors that are supposed to go on-line in 2035-2037, so 13-15 years from now. And that's in a country that's a) pretty much all-in on nuclear and b) already experiencing power shortages (that are only offset by the ability to import power from other countries such as Germany).
There was surely a time where constructing nuclear reactors went quicker in Germany, around the 1960s-1970s, but that's because we had an experienced industry at the time. Once you stop building specific things like this for some time, you lose the specialists required to do so.
At the moment nuclear is the only source that guarantees vast amounts of electricity on demand. I think it's unrealistic to think that wind and solar (at least in Northern Europe) will be enough to meet demand of industrial nations, not least when all vehicles are EV.
By exiting nuclear Germany has both put itself in a corner and committed to continued high emissions (despite their claim that they are going 'green') because they have to keep relying on coal and gas. Ideological dogma is never good.
[1] https://www.enappsys.com/interconnectorreview/#:~:text=Franc....
* a plethora of safety problems, often created due to a lack of maintenance and lax oversight - most famously more than a dozen reactors are offline for years because of corrosion in neglected backup cooling systems
* large reactors require huge amount of cooling water. They usually take water from rivers and release the warmed water right back to it, but rivers often run low in the summer, or are already so warm that rising the temperature any more would kill the river.
* nuclear reactors are hard to regulate below a threshold of about 40% of their peak, which requires base load demand to be reserved just for them if they are to be run.
The last one is almost funny, because the base load problem of nuclear reactors is often somehow portrayed as a benefit. Power production must match power consumption though, so an inflexible power source is a burden. Without the ability to export power to its neighbours, France's reactors would have even less uptime than they have now.
With wind you are totally reliant on the weather, which is also why offshore wind tends to work better as apparently wind patterns are more constant and predictable.
Your three bullet points are all strawman arguments.
You're going to need some serious citation for that.
The argument is a little disingenuous in any case because temporarily stopping reactors for maintenance, especially planned maintenance (in this case delayed because of Covid), is not at all the same as the inherent uncertainty that sources dependent on the weather (e.g. wind) suffer from.
As said, with nuclear/gas/coal/etc you know what you'll get pretty much day in day out. With wind it's never guaranteed.
[1] https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-questio...
What? Since when? Most of the land of the world is still occupied by nature, and with cities expanding and remote villages disappearing the trend is not going against nature as much as you think.
all of this is based on modelling that is open to question.
I am pretty sure such a change will ruffle a few feathers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Therm...
Perhaps not close enough.
- look up "infrasound" and "undercutting minimum distances", better use something else than Google for this.
- also check the requirements for the base materials: concrete, aluminium, fiber-reinforced plastic. Calculate the energy requirements for producing them.
- familiarize yourself with the space requirements (~ two acres of highly compacted soil, not including access roads)
- duration and disposal
- soil dehydration, other environment impact issues
- ... and as always of course, base load capability and storability
https://www.energymonitor.ai/tech/renewables/weekly-data-how...
If you don't mention the societal needs, and merely make unsupported claims that "windows kill birds," then you are being woefully disingenuous. Because windows do not kill eagles, but wind farms do! This is an important distinction which your blanket statement does not cover.
As for what's marginal, damaging or wasteful, then why is Germany supporting the construction of a woefully and inadequate technology when they have a much better alterative: Nuclear power?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-nuclear_movement_in_Germa...
The Green Party is a result of the Anti-nuclear movement in Germany. They need to do a 180 first, before nuclear in Germany can happen again. That probably happens in the next three months...
All electricity generation is for societal needs.
And those eagles? One unfortunate incident, fixed by decommissioning one tower?
They predict that it will increase into the tens of millions, as more windmills are constructed.
Perhaps that number is "negligible" in a relative sense, but why kill birds at all? We should be working to increase the bird population, not adding more ways to kill them.
I'm not an expert, but just a bit of web searching has turned up some alarming studies and predictions. Maybe they're exaggerated; maybe they're one-sided. But it seems to me the problem shouldn't just be dismissed out of hand.
Birds eat ticks and other pests. 50 years ago, flocks of birds were much larger. Huge swarms of birds would descend on a pasture or a green grass yard and pretty much eat all the bugs. This is a beneficial thing.
Stopping wind power expansion because of the birds that die in collisions is like not extinguishing a building on fire because of fears of the damage the water will do to the building.
That said, many laws include provisions to minimise the harm to birds and bats. Including the German one under discussion.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200302-how-do-wind-farm...
https://www.treehugger.com/ways-to-protect-bats-and-birds-fr...
Apparently, transparent buildings kill a lot more birds than wind farms do.
As others have pointed out bats are actually much more in danger of windmills then birds. And they got lots of other problems too (White-nose syndrome)
Most birds of prey (well just about any predator species really) are usually endangered not because we directly kill them directly but because we destroy their ability to eat either by destroying the environment they hunt in or lower the amount of prey species available for them.
There are some exceptions like wolves, etc that kill livestock and thus farmers will hunt them usually to the point of wiping out the local population if given the opportunity.
Other than that, there are no more dead birds under a windmill than anyplace else. Such a study was posted here on HN no too long ago.
Absolutist statements aren’t very helpful in that context. Obviously wind turbines do kill birds. The correct consequence of that fact is not to never build wind turbines. It’s to find the right trade off between protecting birds, while still preserving the ability to have a shot at the needed energy transformation.
Bird killings just aren’t bad enough or frequent enough to justify that.
What specific issue do you take with the way this change proposes to deal with birds?
This isn't going to make up for decommissioning their nuclear plants, and it's not going to wean them off of Russian gas and oil before... 2050 or so.
I really don't think German leadership is serious about the energy dependence crisis they are in, and feel-good measures aren't going to cut it.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...
("not reducing CO2 emissions fast enough", because nuclear)
While nobody really cares that Poland (along with so many other countries) is doing this:
https://aleasoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/20190724-ale...
("80% coal now and forever? meh, who cares?")
It's almost as if Germany proving the model that you can reduce CO2 while turning off nuclear plants that is attracting flak.
2. Because Germany deliberately shut down low-carbon footprint nuke powerplant to please their voters, then built coal-burning plants to compensate for the lack of production.
3. Because Germany is the first economy of Europe and arguably the top political power (which is not the case of Poland, far from it) and thus should be leading bby example.
> It's almost as if Germany proving the model that you can reduce CO2 while turning off nuclear plants that is the underlying problem.
Germany is not proving anything: today is a good day (https://app.electricitymap.org/map), and her electricity is still 4× carbon heavier than France, and closer to Balkan-level than Western Europe level.
That's already not true.
> In 2020, Poland produced 152,208 GWH from primary energy sources, relying heavily on coal and fossil fuels. Hard coal, accounted for 47% of primary energy production in 2020, followed by lignite (24.9 %), natural gas (9.1 %), crude oil (1.6%) and renewables (10.75 %). More than 6% of Poland’s energy was produced by industrial power plants.
In Germany there were 560,000 GWH produced with 16.2% from lignite and 7.5% from hard coal.
According to my napkin calculations that means Germany produced approximately 1.4 times the amount of energy by coal.
I just read it from GP's figure, I indeed didn't check further.
Not 6x more. They're producing about 150 TWh from coal for 84 million people while Poland does about 120 TWh for just 37 million people.
Per capita, Germany uses far less coal and with current trends it'll use less actual coal for its 87 million people fairly soon.
>Because Germany deliberately shut down low-carbon footprint nuke powerplant to please their voters, then built coal-burning plants to compensate
That accounts for the slight blip on the graph I linked to above that lasted until 2014. This blip has received an overwhelming amount of attention given that it was relatively small, lasted a few years and coal usage started diving again in 2014.
It was symbolically important to the nuclear industry, but for all the wrong reasons.
>Because Germany is the first economy of Europe
This is the only reasonable answer.
>today is a good day (https://app.electricitymap.org/map), and her electricity is still 4× carbon heavier than France
Going back in time and building nuclear plants in the 1960-70s probably is the best way to have a relatively cheap, carbon free grid in 2020 but unfortunately it also means that there's an almighty gargantuan bill to pay when those same plants age out in 2030. France is sitting on either a financial ticking time bomb if they choose to rebuild or a potential nuclear disaster if they choose to extend their lifetimes well beyond viability.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-trouble-with-europes-ageing-...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/nuclear-plants-renewable-energ...
It would be great if globabl warming were per capita, too.
> This blip has received an overwhelming amount of attention given that it was relatively small, lasted a few years and coal usage started diving again in 2014.
That's the whole problem, that it stayed a ‶blip″ instead of becoming the foot of a growing curve. No one said that Germany was 80% carbon-free then, only that they nipped in the bud any chance of decreasing their carbon production for the last decade.
> a potential nuclear disaster
Is that much worse than the actual half-a-century running disaster?
https://www.euractiv.com/section/air-pollution/news/german-c...
https://climateanalytics.org/briefings/about-80-of-eu-and-ge...
https://www.dw.com/en/coal-fired-plants-cause-huge-health-bi...
Germany's behavior also makes it harder for other countries to do what they do. Since it's a unified grid, Germany gets to virtue signal without getting serious about the centralized storage needed to make all renewables possible. Other countries hit the storage needs way sooner because the grid as a whole is already trying to buffer Germany's intermittent power.
We had a government that was actively dragging its feet and, in many ways, hindering progress. You can call that greenwashing, I would describe it as paying lip service to transformation while doing little to get ahead and also hindering progress in certain places when things got difficult.
It never felt very virtue-signaly to me, though.
I‘m all in favor of (critically) giving this new government at least a couple of years until we measure to what extent they were able to clean up that mess.
This, for example, is a necessary step because many of the states have been actively hindering wind power expansion with overly broad regulation. That‘s why wind power expansion fell off a cliff during the last couple of years.
Whether this measure can change that I do not know, but that’s the relevant background and with that context it makes sense why this is happening now.
Storage is kind of a moot point when half of your grid energy is provided by burning gas. A megawatt provided by wind in 3 years time is 100 euros not sent to Putin - no matter how intermittently it is produced.
The graph above refutes any idea of this being virtue signalling. % renewables is only going up, fast.
Stop being a stupid marginalist. The cost of renewables is only cheap when one doesn't both to do the grid storage and other serious steps that make it actually scale to a 100% solution. Then it balloons right back up again.
Any country that cannot build a nuclear power plant on time will also hit delays trying to do other major infrastructure projects like grid-scale storage.
We'll see which!
Words are cheap, and it's easy to lie about "oh, the decommissioning process has started, we just can't back out".
It's not true. If you look at their "analysis", it has gems like "fuel might be more expensive in the future". If Russia turned off their NG and oil, Germany could absolutely keep those plants running for decades, with minimal or no safety risk.
See "Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis"
When there is no wind, we need some other source of energy (for now we don't have any practical energy storage - we don't have batteries and pump storage can work only if we have a big lake on the hill and the other at the bottom of it), this is also cost of having wind power plant.
Since it is not easy to plan upfront when and how big energy deficit might happen, we need to purchase energy on request and this is expensive.
There is also another problem: what if it is very windy and you can add that much energy to the grid? Easy, you just turn off some windmills, the problem is that wind power plants owners does not like that idea, so they also want money if production needs to be lowered beneath some level. Obviously there is some margin, nuclear/coal power plants have some means to slow/speed up electricity production, but only to some extent.
The irony is that we have a energy source, which is "magic", it is clean, predictable, we know how to operate it - nuclear energy plants, but for some reason we are chasing some silver bullet with horrible energy density, that looks bad and is not reliable.
If eco people were not fighting nuclear energy for last 50 years we would have been now in much better shape today. People who wanted to work on nuclear plants in the academia were treated like Holocaust deniers, so we have seen hardly any progress in the field for a long time, that's why we don't have any good way to handle nuclear wastes except storage (if they are radiating, there is energy there, why not to find a way to use it?).
1. Wind turbines look really slick in my opinion
2. These people don't complain about power transmission pylons, which are uglier to look at!
Again iirc(!), line operators get a guaranteed return of 8%, while land-owners get a low one-time payment.
And maybe the crisis will finally push this, but my guess is, this will take plenty more years until finally being built fully.
They are expensive, but I also don't hate it. If we can reduce the impact of infrastructure on people, we should do it.
Some people complain that birds will fly into them, as if climate change won’t kill 1000x as many birds as turbines ever will.
Exactly. Since watching Macross Plus when I was young, wind turbines instill a deep nostalgia in me. Though Yoko Kanno’s soundtrack is likely partly to blame. :)
They're a visible symbol of non-progress, we had windmills for centuries and it's literally one of the most low-tech ways to produce power.
Though I would argue that current wind is extremely new, in the advanced manufacturing methods for such massive structures, in the design of blades and placement on wind farms. And for flaring offshore wind, the engineering is truly impressive. Thinking that modern wind turbines are centuries old tech is like thinking that nuclear power is centuries old tech because it boils water to generate mechanical force.
But again, "new" is not the desirable property, it's only a means to other better attributes.
The pylons, no one complains because they’re used to them. No kid will grow up complaining about turbines.
Perhaps your memory of turbine perception is dominated by some examples that weren't quite as big as you might have thought? It's really difficult to judge the size of those things (they are all "much bigger than a house") if you don't deliberately focus on rpm (this little trick only works in reasonably high wind conditions of course)
Our ability to manufacture has so outpaced our ability to construct that nuclear doesn't really fit modern economies very well.
Yes, we should invest in both SMRs and advanced storage, not because we are assuming feasibility, but because we can't know their feasibility without trying them.
> Storage companies have a far better track record of delivering on their promises than the nuclear industry does
I disagree, and anyway I'm not saying "invest in SMRs instead of storage" but rather in addition to because it increases our odds of finding a viable solution and moreover a diverse grid is a robust grid (different energy sources are likely to have different failure modes, such that we have a fallback in case one source experiences a catastrophic failure).
https://www.powermag.com/researchers-say-smrs-will-produce-m...
Lovely. Would take loooooots of windmills instead.
After all we all must make small sacrifices for green energy right?
A reminder that Vaclav Smil has called wind turbines 'the perfect embodiment of fossil fuels' : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkj_91IJVBk&t=2033s (Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019)
Refusing to build green energy because doing so consumes natural resources does not stop those resources from being exploited. It leads to more exploitation.
I'm not against renewables, but I bring up the above point to proffer that it needs to come with some social niche changes to facilitate less overall energy load.
Papers like http://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/ help point out the differences between nations/cultures.
I chuckled.
That sounds like a way to make lots of people hate wind farms.
It's not a threat, it's a statement of preferred outcomes with a "we truly prefer not to do this" fallback in case the preferred solution is not achieved on their own terms.
It will only escalate if they don't meet goals and it is telegraphed in advance.
- if resistance is too high on projects that meet the minimum distance rules then you instead get projects even closer to home
- if minimum distance rules are set too restrictive they get waved entirely, so you are better off setting reasonable rules in the first place
Theoretically the federal government can define the regulation around the necessary distance of wind farms to where people live. However, the federal government gave that power to the states – which lead to some states creating very restrictive distance regulations, effectively making it impossible to build many wind farms and making it impossible to meet their targets that are needed for the energy transformation.
This is the federal government giving the states fair warning that those targets are non-negotiable and that it’s the federal government who has the power to make overriding distance regulations. But, obviously, the preference is still for the states to figure this out on their own, depending on their own unique circumstances.
If the federal government were to step in it‘s not as though the would build wind farms in people‘s backyards just to spite the states. They would then just define distance rules that would allow them to meet the wind farm targets. That‘s all.
Wind power may be a red-herring as a generation option for our civilization as a whole.
Sorry if this is disappointing to readers. But unless you want 10,000 wind towers in your county I don't know what other option to suggest.
Also, the median new wind turbine in the US is over 3 MW now.
Half a GW is about par?
So we're talking what, only 150-300 1.5MW towers per reactor?
The cost has been going down steadily, and even now onshore wind only costs half as much per MWh as nuclear[0], whose cost has been going up. And that isn't even factoring in the long term cost of nuclear.
> unreliable (can you provide guaranteed output 24/7/365?)
Fair. You can only do that with a globally distributed, modern, energy grid that combines solar and wind. Not really a problem with HVDC losses being only 3.5%/1000km nowadays.
On a global scale solar and wind are a remarkably stable energy source.
> and it ruins vast landscapes
I present to you, a brown coal mine[1]. I think wind turbines actually look pretty cool, but I guess that's subjective.
I like nuclear as much as much as the next reasonable person, but your stance on wind energy doesn't strike me as reasonable.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/194327/estimated-leveliz...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambach_surface_mine#/media/Fi...
The wind doesn't go to 0, ever. You would need a _lot_ of turbines, but that is a solved problem. We have the space and the resources.
Obviously this won't be the solution, nor would any reasonable person want it to be (because there are better solutions available), but I am quite tired of hearing 'but wind is not always available'. It's a true but pointless argument to make (because of the above point).
To clarify -- if you massively overprovision for peak demand, then in times where wind is low there would still be enough energy generated even in peak demand. We could then even sell the extra energy for times when wind is high to neighbouring countries.
I suspect the growth in the number of electric vehicles might change that.
Technology marched on. Panels and installation are dirt cheap and solar is highly effective.
Also, the price of the natgas plant will be much higher than otherwise - if it's only getting used 10-20% of the year, as capex and opex will be spread over a far fewer amount of kWhs.