Germany generating so much windpower today that price for electricity will fall... below zero

[KelleyKramer]

It's too bad we don't have any wind here in the US ......


Germany set to pay customers for electricity usage as renewable energy generation creates huge power surplus

Output from wind turbines forecast to hit record on Sunday


http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/germany-grids-paying-electricity-customers-renewable-energy-power-surplus-wind-solar-generation-a8022576.html?utm_content=buffer1acda&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer




Wind generation is forecast to climb to a record on Sunday, creating more output than needed and driving electricity prices below zero, broker data compiled by Bloomberg show. It would be the first time this year that the average price for a whole day is negative, not just for specific hours.

Germany’s grid operators can struggle to keep the balance between how much energy people are using and how much is being produced when there are high amounts of wind generation. Negative prices mean that producers must either shut down power stations to reduce supply or pay consumers to take the electricity off the grid.

Wind output is forecast to peak at 39,190 megawatts at 7am on Sunday, equivalent to the output of about 40 nuclear reactors and enough to meet more than half of Germany’s total demand. Onshore wind turbines accounted for almost a third of Germany’s installed power capacity at the end of June and the nation is poised to increase new installations by 9 percent this year, according to industry federation BWE.

Wind power currently supplies about 10 percent of Europe’s electricity and is expected to continue to grow as the technology becomes cheaper. The cost of electricity from offshore wind farms, once one of the most expensive forms of green energy, is expected to slide by 71 percent over the next two decades, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.


.

[Stryst]

1. Here I am in Northern Florida, wind blowing and sun shinning all day

...and yet the electricity that powered this post came from burning oil.

[hibbing]

2. U.S. Drill baby drill and "clean coal" USA! USA!

[roamer65]

3. The iPad posting this reply runs completely off solar power.

Same for my iPhone.

[LiberalLovinLug]

4. Meanwhile the rest of the world advances with clean energy

And the contracts and new jobs that goes with it.

[RainCaster]

5. Meanwhile in DC, our government is stalled by an excess of wind

Too many pols enchanted by the payola from Big Oil.

[shadowmayor]

6. Fukushima

The greatest man-made disaster ever, and barely a peep from the media. It's always tweets and protests and football games and celebrity nonsense. After reading this story, how can anybody advocate building another nuclear reactor or coal fired power plant?

[Caliman73]

28. Money has a funny way of greasing the skids.

You will find many, many people willing to advocate anything given enough money. Those very people tend to find themselves situated closely to the halls of power. That always has a peculiar way of working itself out.

[EX500rider]

40. No, Chernobyl was way worse.

Though Fukushima and Chernobyl are both level 7 nuclear accidents, the health consequences in Japan to date are much less severe. ... So far, Fukushima Dai-ichi has released about one-tenth of the amount of radioactive material that escaped Chernobyl, according to an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Fukushima_and_Chernobyl_nuclear_accidents

[shadowmayor]

47. You are correct ex-rider

Nonetheless, both these disasters make the case for non-concentrated power generation that is sustainable. Thanks for the correction!

[iluvtennis]

7. We have some wind turbines here in the San Francisco Bay Area in the Altamont Pass...

...it's about 50 miles east of San Francisco



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm

[hunter]

23. Those ugly turbines littering the hillsides in the photo you posted are mostly dead now.

They are slowly being removed, hopefully the most dangerous and dirtiest first.

The 21st century monster turbines you see as you drive over the pass generate far more power than these ever did.

[iluvtennis]

24. "Ugly", I'll just leave that there. nt

[Eko]

35. "ugly" just like "dead"

are your opinions and neither are backed with facts.

[hunter]

38. Their are still thousands of dead 20th century wind turbines littering the hillsides of California.

They're out in the open where anyone can count them.

These old style wind turbines can't compete with today's giant wind turbines.

It's not worth repairing them, and resources to remove them and restore scarred landscapes are lacking. The commercial entities that installed them, many of them run as pyramid schemes (remember Enron?) are long gone.

That's a fact. I drive past these abandoned wind farms, in various parts of California, several times each year.

Hopefully modern jetliner-sized wind turbines will prove at least as durable as jetliners are.

[Eko]

41. How do you know they are dead?

Do you have any evidence that there are thousands of dead wind turbines littering the hills of Ca.?

[hunter]

44. Oh bother...

When you see a hillside covered with wind turbines, some of them missing blades, some entirely headless, some of them turning, some of them not, it's safe to assume the entire field is abandoned. Nobody owns these things, nobody wants to be liable for cleaning up the mess.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abandoned-dreams-of-wind-and-light

[Eko]

45. Thats interesting.

From your article "Tehachapi and Altamont are the granddaddies of them all — sites of a 1970s-1980s wind energy rush gone wrong. Federal subsidies sparked developers into action, crowding what are now considered antique, poorly functioning turbines into particularly windy areas of California."
But,,
In 2015, NextEra, which owns some of the 100kw Kenetech/US Windpower older turbines, installed during the 1980s, agreed to remove the machines and replace them with 48 new model wind turbines. A power purchase agreement has been completed to power the Googleplex office complex in nearby Mountain View, California. The process of removing old wind turbines and replacing them with newer machines is called repowering. [8]

A portion of the wind energy center is being dismantled as of 2016. Altamont Winds Inc (AWI)'s 83MW of 100kW Kenetech turbines are being taken down. These are older models with lattice towers. It has been proposed to replace them with 27 turbines with rated capacity of 2.1MW each (56.7MW total).[9]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altamont_Pass_Wind_Farm

Doesn't sound abandoned at all.
"it's safe to assume the entire field is abandoned. Nobody owns these things, nobody wants to be liable for cleaning up the mess."
Maybe it's not safe to assume at all.

Still waiting for some proof of "thousands" of dead turbines.

[Eko]

46. And from 2017.

Salka LLC announced the execution of a purchase and sale agreement for an in-development wind farm in the east San Francisco Bay Area called the Summit Wind Project. The agreement was signed with Castlelake, L.P., a global private investment firm, on behalf of the funds it manages. The project will re-power a former Altamont Pass wind farm by replacing 569, 100-kW wind turbines with 27 modern turbines. The project is expected to generate more than 60% of its power during peak hours for Bay Area consumers.
http://www.windpowerengineering.com/projects/salka-re-power-former-altamont-pass-wind-farm-california/

And as to why you see some of them turning and some not, there may not be enough wind in the spot the turbine is in, it is shut down for maintenance or replacing, the wind farm is already producing at capacity or there is too much wind that can damage it. Simple things really.

[hunter]

48. Politically powerful people see the Altamont Pass wind turbines from the highway...

...driving from Silicon Valley to Sacramento and back.

That makes a difference. In other parts of California it will be many years before dead 20th century wind farms are removed. Yes, without a doubt, these wind farms are dead and abandoned.

I'm not arguing against wind energy as the climate change deniers do.

My argument is that wind and solar are not drop-in replacements for fossil fuel or nuclear power plants and they shouldn't be sold as such.

A society powered exclusively by wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources would look nothing like the high energy industrial consumer economy many of us now enjoy.

[not fooled]

8. If this country was run properly

there would be solar panels on every roof.

Can't have that because it interferes with the profits of the power and fossil fuel companies, which must have massive centralized generation operations.

We are so screwed.

[YOHABLO]

12. You're right about that. If it doesn't mean ripping off the masses for huge profits, then forget it.

[Cosmocat]

15. Yep

nm

[sarah FAILIN]

30. I looked at solar

My contractor told me the savings would take at least 25 years to pay for the cost of the install and equipment. I couldn't afford it even though I wanted it.

[not fooled]

31. The government here should do

what the government in Germany did--incentivize installation through tax credits or requiring banks to issue low-interest loans that make solar affordable. As things stand, I guess in the current political climate in the U.S. you're on your own, which does often make solar prohibitively expensive. But, that wouldn't be the case if we had public policy in the interests of the planet and populace.

[DFW]

9. Fukushima freaked all of Europe out. Merkel actually did something about it.

We are all so close together here, it's hard to imagine if you live in a country as (comparatively) vast as the USA. When Chernobyl blew 31 years ago here, we were advised not eat locally grown mushrooms for years, and Chernobyl is 1000 miles from our part of Germany. There are active nuclear power plants that are old and defective in both France and Belgium less than a half hour's drive from Germany's border. After Fukushima, Merkel, whose party had backed nuclear power previously, did a 180° and said THAT kind of risk is not one we can take any longer. No new nuclear power plants, and closing both them and coal powered plants as soon as could be done practically. Thousands of people out of work? Yes, unfortunately, but better the expense of taking care of and retraining them than what would happen if something like Fukushima would happen in a country with a fourth the population of the USA fit into a space about half the size of Texas. If something like Fukushima or Chernobyl were to happen in the middle of Germany, the number of dead and injured would make the bombing of Dresden look like a slow day at the emergency room. The same goes for France, Belgium and all other neighboring countries that have not shut down their non-renewable energy plants, but they will have to eventually, and if we are producing more electricity than we need though renewables, maybe we can send some of the excess to our neighbors while they restructure.

Trump can have all the photo ops with coal miners in West Virginia he wants, but the fact remains that our survival depends on shutting those mines down and using wind and solar power to replace the coal-fired power plants.

[KelleyKramer]

11. Isn't Germany down to 1 or 2 nuke plants left?

Thanks for the info

Seems like I saw an article about a year or so ago about Germany going solar and iirc it also said they had one or two nuclear plants left (or maybe that was their short-term projection?)

I remember being shocked at how fast they were moving

[Ezior]

17. Still 8 left

But one of them will have to shut down until December 31, and the remaining 7 all within 5 years and 2 months (most of them sooner).

For some general stats about the German grid:
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&week=43&year=2017
https://www.energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm
https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share.htm
https://www.energy-charts.de/price.htm (this one is broken because of today's clock change)

[KelleyKramer]

19. Thanks, that's amazing progress

And just a few years ago there were people saying it was impossible

[DFW]

20. I don't know how many are left on line, but they are disappearing rapidly

The one in Belgium near the border with Aachen is scaring everyone, as it has one incident after another. Germany is giving one tax break after another to companies that work exclusively on renewables, and houses that install solar. A well-off friend of mine moved from the suburbs out to the country, and made sure there was enough land to make his residence self-sufficient in renewable energy with solar panels, which it now is. But bureaucrats will not stop being bureaucrats, and he gets a big tax break if the solar panels are in one position on his roof, but not if they're in another.

Once Merkel saw what happened in Fukushima, she didn't hesitate. She realized the potential catastrophe if such a thing happened in Germany, and started immediately on trying to prevent it. Very UN-European of her, actually.

[hunter]

25. There's no way Germany can break it's dirty coal habit and remain a major industrial economy.

They've got some rough choices ahead.

[DFW]

32. Deciding to phase out coal as a source for power plants WAS a rough choice.

It was especially rough in light of the decision to phase out nuclear power as well--a hard choice, but the right one. And it is still a major industrial economy. You should have seen what the air was like here in the fifties, or even in the mid eighties in the Ruhr area. The whole place stank of brown coal. That is now a memory. This country has accepted that coal mining is a dying industry, and that it is one with a finite future. Even if all steps on that road have not yet been mapped out, the goal is there--one we would do well to adopt, rather than have a bunch of coal miners pose in the oval office. The symbol of Trump giving them one pen to share among them as a souvenir was not lost here as an indication of how much he understood what he was up to.

[hunter]

34. Scrubbers were installed to control the smog. But the carbon dioxide remains.

Meanwhile Germany sustains it's solar and wind fantasy by using the rest of Europe to source and sink its wind power extremes.

Germany will reduce it's coal use with projects like this:

The NordLink project has been developed by Statnett in cooperation with grid company TenneT and investment bank KfW in Germany. The subsea cable will connect the Norwegian and German electricity markets for the first time.

The last couple of years have seen a significant increase in wind power and solar power in Germany. When the winds blow and the sun shines this creates a surplus of renewable energy in Germany, which also leads to lower prices than in Norway. Norway can then import this power and conserve the water in Norway's many hydropower reservoirs. When there is little production of wind power and solar power in Germany the need for power increases and the prices will be higher than in Norway. Norway can then produce hydropower and export it to Germany. This way we get more out of the resources on both sides of the cable.

http://www.statnett.no/en/Projects/NORDLINK/

In effect, Norway will play the part for Germany that California's nimble gas and hydroelectric plants play in the California electricity market. (Norway is the world's third largest natural gas exporter, they could just as well export gas generated electricity over HVDC lines.)

But overall the solar and wind aspect of the project is window dressing. I don't expect anywhere near the bulk of electricity flowing through the Nordlink HVDC line will be excess solar or wind power generated in Germany. The line is too valuable to use as a simple battery, useful only a few days a year. Optimistically the line will be used to export Norwegian hydro and gas generated electricity to Germany, which will reduce Germany's dependence on dirty coal more than Germany's solar will, and more than Germany's wind turbines will most days. It would be a bad thing if the line was used to export cheap coal generated electricity to Norway.

German solar has always been irrational, installed for ideological reasons rather than practical reasons. It would make a lot of sense to move those solar panels to sunnier places in the world if the actual goal is to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions.

[DFW]

37. Solar isn't irrational as long as it isn't overrated

Sure, we don't have the vast spaces or the amount of sunshine of the Arizona desert here, but the cumulative effect of renewables is enough to not regard any of it as purely window dressing. I wasn't even taking Norway into the equation. And solar panels aren't completely useless on cloudy days.

The scrubbers, by the way reduce the smog, but they don't eliminate it entirely, and of course the CO2 remains. Burning ANYTHING for power is ultimately a negative for global warming, which is why EVERY alternative other than nuclear is preferable. Even hydro is precarious if it means diverting natural flows of waterways. The only "it's gonna happen anyway" resources we have are wind and solar, and one way or another, those countries that figure out how to harness them for energy with the greatest efficiency will be the best off. Reagan had the solar panels Jimmy Carter installed on the White House removed. Imagine how far along the USA would be today, if we had followed Carter's initiative uninterrupted. Merkel may have gotten there forty years late, but at least SOMEONE has decided to take the lead. Trump sure isn't going to be the one to do it.

[world wide wally]

10. All we get is a bunch of hot air

[YOHABLO]

13. Speaking of Fukushima:Are millions of gallons of radio active waste still spilling into the Pacific?

[KelleyKramer]

14. No, but they are talking about dumping it on purpose

They have been storing it, millions of gallons in storage tanks. I think they are running out of space, there was a report early this year they had requested approval to just DUMP IT INTO THE OCEAN

[TomVilmer]

16. And sometimes it even costs money to produce electricity...

On very windy days the big wind power parks has to close some of the mills down. Not for security, but because there are still no good ways to preserve all this green energy for later. But when all the possible export routes are working, Denmark has been running only on wind plus producing 40 percent more just for export.

[Fred Sanders]

21. Battery farms. Once battery or solid state storage has developed enough, as Telsa is

researching, the problem of excess capacity will be solved.

[onethatcares]

18. meanwhile Duke energy

is going to raise rates just to keep the bonuses up where the execs like. along with charging customers for their negligence in coal ash accidents and nuke plants that won't be built.

We are fucked

[hunter]

22. Why celebrate yet another major fault of wind energy?

When the windmills are not turning they are losing money. When all of them are spining furiously in windy weather they are losing money.

The sad fact is that Germany gets most of it's power from dirty brown coal.

The only decent thing about the German Electric grid is that it is transparent, anybody can look at the statistics and do the math:

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm

A society powered entirely by renewable energy would look nothing like the high energy industrial consumer economy many of us now enjoy, and certainly nothing like the current German economy.

The German electric grid is a sorry fraud celebrated by innumerate people who call themselves "green." Giant industries such as Volkswagen pay about four or five cents a kilowatt hour for dirty, reliable 24/7 coal power, while smaller power users foot the bill for this failed solar and wind experiment, paying around six times that.

Germany could quit the coal industry for coals's nasty little brother, natural gas. Nimble gas power plants are very useful for picking up the load when the wind's not blowing and the sun's not shining. That's how my electric utility here in California deals with intermittent wind and solar power. Thanks to our nimble natural gas plants backing up otherwise decorative solar and wind projects, and a little over 20% nuclear power, we Northern Californians don't need no stinking coal. Our electric rates are also tiered so that small household users enjoy lower rates.

Unfortunately if Germany chose to implement a similar system it might mean they'd have to import more natural gas controlled by Russia's Putin & Company. California has somewhat nicer neighbors (other states, Canada, and Mexico), even a few willing to expose their own populations to fracking so we Californians don't have to.

[Eko]

36. dont bother responding to this person

The fact that renewables are creating more of our and others electricity which means less fossil fuel use doesnt mean a thing to them.

[Irish_Dem]

26. Is the power company in Hawaii still blocking residential solar panels?

The utility companies will prevent us from having cheap power in the US.

[hunter]

42. The Hawaii power company seems somewhat beholden to the same oil companies...

... that refuel the jets bringing in tourists, and cargo haulers.

The electric company burned 8.5 million barrels of oil in 2016. That's a lot of $$$ and there's political pressure not to disrupt that business. The amount of oil burned to produce electricity is already declining, partly from more efficient electric appliances and lighting, partly from renewables.

There's nothing stopping anyone from installing solar panels on their roof in Hawaii, it's been about selling excess electricity to the power company, "making the meter run backwards," that upset the utility, even though the technology for maintaining grid stability is now mature... with some kudos to Germany's renewable energy experience.

The Hawaii state legislature is aiming for 100% renewable by 2045.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_Electric_Industries

Hawaii, like other islands, seems an ideal place for electric vehicles powered by renewable energy. Range anxiety really isn't an issue when you can't drive that far. On the Big Island, it's 125 miles from Hilo to Kailuna-Kona on the other side of the island, via highway 11. The other Hawaiian islands are smaller than that. A 2017 Chevrolet Bolt has a range of 238 miles.

[Irish_Dem]

43. Thanks for the update. nt

[WinkyDink]

27. Our private-enterprise electric utilities companies WILL NEVER LOWER CONSUMER COSTS, EVER!!!

[PoliticAverse]

29. Hey, we were promised "electrical energy too cheap to meter" back in 1954. n/t

[Snackshack]

33. As long as the

Energy industry (nuclear/coal/oil/gas) in this country is driven by profit we will continue to be told that reneweable/clean energy does not work...because it gets dark once a day or cloudy or not always windy...that it is bad and have roadblock after roadblock put in place to slow it down like taxing people extra who install solar panels on their homes. The best argument I have heard by a person against wind was that wind farms would create so much drag on the planet that it would be knocked out of its orbit.

Eventually the harsh reality of climate change will force the switch to renewable energy but by then it will be too late (it already is) to make a difference.

[Vinca]

39. Every structure in this country has a roof of some sort and they all face the sun.

It's a shame big coal/oil/gas energy producers can't see the money in it. Many people can't afford a solar array - probably most people - so a company could rent the equipment for less than the current cost of energy and still make money (and they'd still own the solar array).