Wolverine
Uncanny Pompadour
[SIZE=14pt]Germany's Green-Energy Gap[/SIZE]
[SIZE=12pt]Germany stumbles in its move to replace coal and nuclear power with offshore wind energy[/SIZE]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/ger...reen-energy-gap
[A longer article in it's original, but I have excerpted some of what I think are highlights. The moral of the story is, let's cut through the fluff and look at green energy honestly.]
Just a few years ago, many Germans thought that by this time, hundreds of offshore turbine would be scattered off their northern coasts. After all, this prospect was a centerpiece of energy plans not only in Germany but also in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK. But the envisioned embrace of offshore wind power was particularly fervent in Germany, where the country’s center-left political parties hatched plans to double renewable energy’s share of power generation to 30 percent by 2020. But rather than the hundreds of turbines that were to be spinning in Germany’s coastal waters by now to meet that schedule, only three turbines had gone up by the start of this year.
The idea that Germany is playing catch-up with Europe’s most promising strategy for renewable energy is jarring. This is Germany, the country that 11 years ago put the Green Party in government, decided to phase out nuclear power, and pushed wind energy and photovoltaics to grid scale. Today Germany’s installed wind-turbine capacity of 24 gigawatts ranks second only to that of the United States (which has 25 GW). But despite the promises, greenhouse-gas emissions there haven’t plummeted. Rather, they have gone down only slightly since 2000. Germany, it seems, has lost its groove.
The result is a turnabout that would have seemed preposterous even six months ago: ”Everyone in the environmental community is looking to the U.S. now,” says Elias Perabo, who codirects a campaign against the use of coal for Germany’s Berlin-based Climate Alliance.
---------------------------------------
Hmm, so you say our plan is contrary to the laws of economics and physics? Well then, we’ll just pass a law overriding those laws.
Public opinion turned abruptly against nuclear power in 1986, after the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine sent radioactive fallout over northern Europe and made West Germans uneasy about their own reactors. Popular concern after Chernobyl froze construction of additional reactors and fueled calls from the political left to scrap the nation’s existing nuclear plants. The chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, refused to abandon this source of carbon-free electricity, declaring climate change to be Germany’s top environmental challenge.
In this way, Kohl forged a political consensus for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But so far it is renewable energy, not nuclear, that has reaped the benefits. In 1990, the German government passed its path-breaking Electricity Feed-in Law, compelling utilities to buy all the power that renewable sources on their grid could generate—and at premium prices. The Feed-in Law thus set off a wind-power boom.
In 2001 that boom boomeranged on nuclear energy under Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder. His Green Party–Social Democrat coalition cited wind energy as proof that Germany had an alternative to dirty coal and Russian natural gas in replacing nuclear power. Schröder’s government passed legislation to shut down all of the country’s reactors by 2022.
For that to happen, though, offshore wind power would be key. Germans, like most people, love the idea of wind power, but not all of them like the idea of having their landscapes marred by 130-meter-tall wind turbines. What is more, thanks largely to the 1990 law, most of the sites on land best suited to wind generation were already occupied. So installing turbines in their offshore territorial waters seemed like the best way around these obstacles. And because winds are in general stronger offshore than onshore, planting turbines far out in the sea promised twice as many hours of peak generation for each megawatt of installed capacity (assuming that offshore equipment functions reliably over time).
With these virtues in mind, the government passed its Renewable Energy Act in 2000, extending the favorable tariffs to wind farms in Germany’s North Sea and Baltic waters. By 2002—the year in which annual installations on land peaked at 3240 MW—developers had filed 29 proposals for offshore farms that together would have had a generating capacity of 63 GW, which was equal to half of Germany’s entire installed capacity at the time. Germany’s ministry for the environment (its Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit, or BMU) forecast that 500 MW of offshore wind would be operating by 2006 and that an additional 2500 MW would come on line by 2010.
Then the plans crashed headlong into political reality. Almost immediately, conservationists and marine ecologists questioned proposed incursions into near-shore areas where millions of migratory birds breed and feed.
Earlier, the German government had mandated a tariff of at most 9.1 euro cents (13 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind-generated electricity, no more than its neighbors were offering, despite the higher costs and risks. And last year Merkel improved the revenue side of the ledger, boosting the offshore tariff to 0.15/kWh (US $0.21/kWh).[compare to $0.021/kwH for nuclear]
In 2006 Merkel’s government—a coalition that also included the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Union—made power-grid operators responsible for running cables to offshore farms.
---------------------------------------
Even if these projects get built, offshore wind will generate a lot less energy in 2020 than Germany had hoped for. Just a few years ago, the German Energy Agency (Deutsche Energie-Agentur, or DENA) was projecting 20.4 GW of wind power by 2020, but lately the BMU has cut that forecast to just 10 GW. And even that estimate appears optimistic. ”These 10 gigawatts are not going to be installed by 2020. That’s a fact,” says Emerging Energy Research’s de Vedruna. He puts the figure at 8.4 GW. If every turbine ran full out, they would together deliver less than a quarter of the 149 billion kWh generated by Germany’s nuclear reactors last year.
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What happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Even over the North Sea, the breeze sometimes abates, just as it does frequently enough on land. There was a day in January, for example, when a stalled high-pressure system becalmed many of Germany’s wind turbines, and just 113 MW flowed from the country’s 24 GW of installed capacity. Pushing renewable energy to an ever larger share of power generation means contending with the problem of backing up this fickle source of energy. The challenge is steep. DENA estimates that in 2020 Germany will be able to count on enough renewable generation at any moment to cover just one-eighth of projected peak power demand, even though its wind turbines, photovoltaics, and biomass-fired power plants may constitute more than one-third of installed power capacity.
The gap could even be wider, says Kohler, if energy-efficiency gains slide. For example, the DENA’s analysis assumes that Germany will reduce power demand by 8 percent by 2020. ”This is a realistic scenario,” says Kohler. But then again, ”last year power demand increased 0.9 percent,” he concedes. ”That’s not good.”
As for carbon capture and storage neutralizing the climate risk, Klose says no way, raising the specter of sequestered CO2 escaping to the surface and causing mass asphyxiation. ”If there’s a leak and you have a 1- to 2-meter-high level of CO2 , every animal, every human being within this zone will die,” says Klose. ”I think you can’t take that risk.”
About the Author
Peter Fairley, a contributing editor, writes about energy for Spectrum. When he started research for ”Germany’s Green-Energy Gap”, he anticipated that the nation’s efforts to replace coal- and nuclear-fueled electricity with power from offshore wind turbines might provide a road map for other countries. He discovered, though, that Germany’s green-energy push hasstalled. er, “...provided a road map for why green energy always has been and always will be a failure.” (fixed it for ya’ Pete!)
[SIZE=12pt]Germany stumbles in its move to replace coal and nuclear power with offshore wind energy[/SIZE]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/policy/ger...reen-energy-gap
[A longer article in it's original, but I have excerpted some of what I think are highlights. The moral of the story is, let's cut through the fluff and look at green energy honestly.]
Just a few years ago, many Germans thought that by this time, hundreds of offshore turbine would be scattered off their northern coasts. After all, this prospect was a centerpiece of energy plans not only in Germany but also in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the UK. But the envisioned embrace of offshore wind power was particularly fervent in Germany, where the country’s center-left political parties hatched plans to double renewable energy’s share of power generation to 30 percent by 2020. But rather than the hundreds of turbines that were to be spinning in Germany’s coastal waters by now to meet that schedule, only three turbines had gone up by the start of this year.
The idea that Germany is playing catch-up with Europe’s most promising strategy for renewable energy is jarring. This is Germany, the country that 11 years ago put the Green Party in government, decided to phase out nuclear power, and pushed wind energy and photovoltaics to grid scale. Today Germany’s installed wind-turbine capacity of 24 gigawatts ranks second only to that of the United States (which has 25 GW). But despite the promises, greenhouse-gas emissions there haven’t plummeted. Rather, they have gone down only slightly since 2000. Germany, it seems, has lost its groove.
The result is a turnabout that would have seemed preposterous even six months ago: ”Everyone in the environmental community is looking to the U.S. now,” says Elias Perabo, who codirects a campaign against the use of coal for Germany’s Berlin-based Climate Alliance.
---------------------------------------
Hmm, so you say our plan is contrary to the laws of economics and physics? Well then, we’ll just pass a law overriding those laws.
Public opinion turned abruptly against nuclear power in 1986, after the Chernobyl accident in Ukraine sent radioactive fallout over northern Europe and made West Germans uneasy about their own reactors. Popular concern after Chernobyl froze construction of additional reactors and fueled calls from the political left to scrap the nation’s existing nuclear plants. The chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, refused to abandon this source of carbon-free electricity, declaring climate change to be Germany’s top environmental challenge.
In this way, Kohl forged a political consensus for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. But so far it is renewable energy, not nuclear, that has reaped the benefits. In 1990, the German government passed its path-breaking Electricity Feed-in Law, compelling utilities to buy all the power that renewable sources on their grid could generate—and at premium prices. The Feed-in Law thus set off a wind-power boom.
In 2001 that boom boomeranged on nuclear energy under Kohl’s successor, Gerhard Schröder. His Green Party–Social Democrat coalition cited wind energy as proof that Germany had an alternative to dirty coal and Russian natural gas in replacing nuclear power. Schröder’s government passed legislation to shut down all of the country’s reactors by 2022.
For that to happen, though, offshore wind power would be key. Germans, like most people, love the idea of wind power, but not all of them like the idea of having their landscapes marred by 130-meter-tall wind turbines. What is more, thanks largely to the 1990 law, most of the sites on land best suited to wind generation were already occupied. So installing turbines in their offshore territorial waters seemed like the best way around these obstacles. And because winds are in general stronger offshore than onshore, planting turbines far out in the sea promised twice as many hours of peak generation for each megawatt of installed capacity (assuming that offshore equipment functions reliably over time).
With these virtues in mind, the government passed its Renewable Energy Act in 2000, extending the favorable tariffs to wind farms in Germany’s North Sea and Baltic waters. By 2002—the year in which annual installations on land peaked at 3240 MW—developers had filed 29 proposals for offshore farms that together would have had a generating capacity of 63 GW, which was equal to half of Germany’s entire installed capacity at the time. Germany’s ministry for the environment (its Bundesministerium für Umwelt, Naturschutz und Reaktorsicherheit, or BMU) forecast that 500 MW of offshore wind would be operating by 2006 and that an additional 2500 MW would come on line by 2010.
Then the plans crashed headlong into political reality. Almost immediately, conservationists and marine ecologists questioned proposed incursions into near-shore areas where millions of migratory birds breed and feed.
Earlier, the German government had mandated a tariff of at most 9.1 euro cents (13 U.S. cents) per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind-generated electricity, no more than its neighbors were offering, despite the higher costs and risks. And last year Merkel improved the revenue side of the ledger, boosting the offshore tariff to 0.15/kWh (US $0.21/kWh).[compare to $0.021/kwH for nuclear]
In 2006 Merkel’s government—a coalition that also included the Social Democrats and the Christian Social Union—made power-grid operators responsible for running cables to offshore farms.
---------------------------------------
Even if these projects get built, offshore wind will generate a lot less energy in 2020 than Germany had hoped for. Just a few years ago, the German Energy Agency (Deutsche Energie-Agentur, or DENA) was projecting 20.4 GW of wind power by 2020, but lately the BMU has cut that forecast to just 10 GW. And even that estimate appears optimistic. ”These 10 gigawatts are not going to be installed by 2020. That’s a fact,” says Emerging Energy Research’s de Vedruna. He puts the figure at 8.4 GW. If every turbine ran full out, they would together deliver less than a quarter of the 149 billion kWh generated by Germany’s nuclear reactors last year.
---------------------------------------
What happens when the wind doesn’t blow? Even over the North Sea, the breeze sometimes abates, just as it does frequently enough on land. There was a day in January, for example, when a stalled high-pressure system becalmed many of Germany’s wind turbines, and just 113 MW flowed from the country’s 24 GW of installed capacity. Pushing renewable energy to an ever larger share of power generation means contending with the problem of backing up this fickle source of energy. The challenge is steep. DENA estimates that in 2020 Germany will be able to count on enough renewable generation at any moment to cover just one-eighth of projected peak power demand, even though its wind turbines, photovoltaics, and biomass-fired power plants may constitute more than one-third of installed power capacity.
The gap could even be wider, says Kohler, if energy-efficiency gains slide. For example, the DENA’s analysis assumes that Germany will reduce power demand by 8 percent by 2020. ”This is a realistic scenario,” says Kohler. But then again, ”last year power demand increased 0.9 percent,” he concedes. ”That’s not good.”
As for carbon capture and storage neutralizing the climate risk, Klose says no way, raising the specter of sequestered CO2 escaping to the surface and causing mass asphyxiation. ”If there’s a leak and you have a 1- to 2-meter-high level of CO2 , every animal, every human being within this zone will die,” says Klose. ”I think you can’t take that risk.”
About the Author
Peter Fairley, a contributing editor, writes about energy for Spectrum. When he started research for ”Germany’s Green-Energy Gap”, he anticipated that the nation’s efforts to replace coal- and nuclear-fueled electricity with power from offshore wind turbines might provide a road map for other countries. He discovered, though, that Germany’s green-energy push has
