Solar power in Germany - Impressive start

[Singular Intellect]

You need to take a vacation in England from November to February, or at least stop migrating south for the winter or whatever the hell you're doing. I haven't seen a patch of blue sky for nearly a week! If we had solar panels on our roof here (landlady looked into it but couldn't get subsidies) then we'd be lucky if there was current being generated at all, the weather's been so bad lately. And that's without taking into account the 4:30PM sunsets.

However efficiently we can collect and store solar energy, the total amount to collect is still subject to circumstances beyond our control.

(Sorry, I'm slightly bitter about this given the sheer awfulness of the weather right now.)

You do realize that your vision only perceives a pathetically small slice of the available light spectrum, right? That's why we're working on full spectrum and vastly higher efficiency solar technologies. Like here, here, here, here and here? Never mind all the advances going on it thermal energy capture and storing, etc.

Solar technologies that are rapidly increasing in efficiencies (even harvesting moonlight for fuck's sake), lowering in cost, ramping up production and spreading everywhere.

It sucks you couldn't get solar going in your personal example. That has zero bearing on the industry as a whole and what amazing shit is going on in it.

[Sky Captain]

Problem is clouds reflect 50 - 80 % of solar energy. Even a panel that can capture everything from infrared to ultraviolet vill produce vastly less during cloudy day because the power simply isn't there. You can't cheat the physics. Here in Latvia we haven't had a fully sunny day since October, at best there is maybe 2 - 5 hours of direct sunlight per week. Usually cloud cover is so thick you need to turn on lights in your room to read a book in the midday.

[cosmicalstorm]

The population of Denmark (or some large part of it) got paid for their electrical production the other day. That is optimistic

[aerius]

The laws of chemistry and physics apply, period. There is no free lunch, end of story. In other words, those super batteries that people like to go on about will not happen. All batteries are based on oxidation potentials and energies, you can't cheat the laws of science. Sorry, ain't happening. If you don't understand why, I suggest you leave this thread and study your physics and chemistry textbooks until you get it.

And seasonal variations? (page 8) Can't beat those either. That doesn't change no matter what part of the spectrum is used. Something about the angle of the sun, hours of sun, and that pesky inverse square law.

[D.Turtle]

Luckily we have wind power, which has significantly less variation than solar. And biofuels, which have no variation, and power to gas, which could enable 100% renewable power.

And if all of that still doesn't enable 100% renewable power, we would have still saved humongous amounts of CO2 output we would otherwise have had.

[Thanas]

Biogas actually is a big fraud - it has a huge negative enviromental impact.

[aerius]

Wind looks good on the monthly chart but when you go the weekly chart (see page 19) it gets pretty ugly. The only workable energy storage solutions we have with technology that either exists or is on the drawing boards is pumped hydro and power to gas. Nothing else can store the amount of energy required for large scale power generation.

[Singular Intellect]

Meanwhile, in the real world not fogged by nuclear fanboy fantasies, actual detailed studies on the feasibility of having a renewable energy dominated infrastructure:

Wind and Solar Power Paired With Storage Could Power Grid 99.9 Percent of the Time

Go figure. Actual science and fact checking confirms a renewable energy infrastructure wiping the board against other power generation is quite feasible and cost effective.

[D.Turtle]

Biogas actually is a big fraud - it has a huge negative enviromental impact.

In what way?

@Aerius:
Well, I hope that power to gas can deliver on its promises - and there aren't really any obvious reasons why it shouldn't - because that could enable lots of existing infrastructure to be used easily with renewable power.

The thing with wind is that unlike solar it is not as predictable and complete of a variance aka there are always lots of places where the wind is blowing. With a sufficient power grid wind is capable of meeting energy requirements lots of the time, and thus needs a lot less storage.

[Thanas]

Well, first of all it has actually increased hunger all over the world as the price of grain etc. skyrocketed due to more farmers converting to biofuel. That is the first - not directly an environmental impact but one that IMO is significant nonetheless. Then, we got the problem of Biogas being somewhat bad for the soil in terms of usage and dust creation as well as the usage of fertilizer and its effect on water etc.

So it is still overall better IMO than fossil fuel but it does have an impact which is not insignificant.

[Sky Captain]

Well, if nothing of the more fancy energy storage technologies prove cost effective on industrial scale there always is an option of breaking out heavy duty construction equipment, high explosives and building wast pumped storage reservoirs. Building giant dams across most suitable walleys in Alps and other mountain areas. In Norway building dams acrsos several fjords and pumping out water to create as large difference between ocean level as possible and similar kind of projects. Running multiple GW rated power lines across the continent so regions with surplus renewable power generation could compensate for lack of generation in others and geographically flat areas could access the storage basins hundreds of km distant.

[aerius]

Go figure. Actual science and fact checking confirms a renewable energy infrastructure wiping the board against other power generation is quite feasible and cost effective.

Did you actually read past the title and examine the charts? Did you look at the cost assumptions? Did you also see the conclusion where they note that a large amount of fossil fuel capacity will need to be maintained to fill in the gaps? Oh, and did you note the disclosure and conflicts of interests?

And you will note that they're comparing a cost optimized model (you do know what that means, right?) to today's complete clusterfuck of a grid system in the US. I'd like to see how those numbers stack up against a cost optimized fossil fuel or nuclear system. Hell, let's look at the wholesale price of electricity in Ontario which is sitting at under 2.5 cents/kWh for 2012 compared to 6 cents/kWh in the best case cost optimized model for renewables in 2030. Ontario is hardly perfect so the cost can be knocked down even more.

[Singular Intellect]

Biofuel might have some niche applications and uses, but I think any claims it could practically replace fossil fuels are false. It simply boils down to added steps (thus less efficiency) of harnessing solar power, so skip the middle man and go directly to converting solar radiation into electricity.

[D.Turtle]

So it is still overall better IMO than fossil fuel but it does have an impact which is not insignificant.

Thanks. That's pretty much in line with what I think.

Well, if nothing of the more fancy energy storage technologies prove cost effective on industrial scale there always is an option of breaking out heavy duty construction equipment, high explosives and building wast pumped storage reservoirs. Building giant dams across most suitable walleys in Alps and other mountain areas. In Norway building dams acrsos several fjords and pumping out water to create as large difference between ocean level as possible and similar kind of projects. Running multiple GW rated power lines across the continent so regions with surplus renewable power generation could compensate for lack of generation in others and geographically flat areas could access the storage basins hundreds of km distant.

Except that such a thing is even more unlikely than mass adoption of nuclear energy. And there is lots of research - Singular Intellect has posted some of it - that shows you actually do not need too huge an amount of storage capacity as is often thought.

Biofuel might have some niche applications and uses, but I think any claims it could practically replace fossil fuels are false. It simply boils down to added steps (thus less efficiency) of harnessing solar power, so skip the middle man and go directly to converting solar radiation into electricity.

Agreed. And you can even replace biofuels with hydrogen or methane created through power to gas.

[aerius]

Except that such a thing is even more unlikely than mass adoption of nuclear energy. And there is lots of research - Singular Intellect has posted some of it - that shows you actually do not need too huge an amount of storage capacity as is often thought.

Going through the paper we have the following:

We find that 90% of hours are covered most cost-effectively by a system that generates from renewables 180% the electrical energy needed by load, and 99.9% of hours are covered by generating almost 290% of need. Only 9–72 h of storage were required to cover 99.9% of hours of load over four years.

Let's take a middle value, say, 2 days or 48 hours of storage. They note that the average load is 31.5GW, this gives about 1500 GWh of storage capacity. A good Li-ion battery has an energy density of about 250 Wh/kg, that's 6 million tons of Li-ion batteries, assuming you do a 100% charge-discharge cycle on them, which by the way will wreck them in short order. For best life you don't want to discharge them below 20-30% or charge them to 100%, so you'll lose around 25-30% of the battery's full charge capacity. So you'll need around 8 million tons of lithium ion batteries. Given that the yearly global production of lithium is around 34 000 tons, you got a bit of a problem here. You might want to look up the global reserves too while you're at it. (The article specifies lithium-titanate batteries, which are a subset of lithium-ions)

The 99.9% criterion corresponds to 9 h per year when not all load would be covered. This is a less stringent criterion than the traditional target of “one day in 10 years” or roughly 0.03% of the time. We used 99.9% rather than 99.97% or 100% because to make a claim of 100% coverage would require a simulation run of more than 4 years, because cost may go up asymptotically as we require all hours of load for a longer sequence of years, and because we suspect it would be more cost efficient to use demand management (see below) for the few hours of shortage than to build more generation and storage.

The uptime requirement is relaxed from the traditional 99.97% to 99.9%. This may make a big difference, or it might not, we don't know since they didn't cover it. It's a good start, but we can't say that this is a 100% apples to apples comparison, because it isn't.

And finally, once again, this is a theoretical research model which assumes an ideal cost optimized system for renewables, in other words, the absolute best case scenario given the environmental conditions of the geographic area which was modeled.

[Zaune]

Well, if nothing of the more fancy energy storage technologies prove cost effective on industrial scale there always is an option of breaking out heavy duty construction equipment, high explosives and building wast pumped storage reservoirs. Building giant dams across most suitable valleys in Alps and other mountain areas. In Norway building dams across several fjords and pumping out water to create as large difference between ocean level as possible and similar kind of projects. Running multiple GW rated power lines across the continent so regions with surplus renewable power generation could compensate for lack of generation in others and geographically flat areas could access the storage basins hundreds of km distant.

Damming rivers isn't exactly marvellous for the environment either, and transmission fall-off limits how far we can stretch interoperability; we're not realistically going to see electrical power delivered to Belgium from a pumped-storage site in the Swiss Alps, for example. Power to gas is certainly an option, but hydrogen's energy-density isn't very good and it also undoes most of the decentralisation of the grid that solar enables.

Personally, I think the most realistic scenario with the technology we've got is a mixture of solar and wind power for homes and offices backed up by a few nuclear plants to supply the needs of heavy industry, which can be run up during the winter in order to cover the shortfall. What ratio of solar to nuclear and other we'll eventually achieve I have no idea, but I honestly don't think solar is ever going to achieve 100% dominance. Not this side of developing room-temperature superconductors or a battery technology whose energy-density per volume is on a par with gasoline.

[Iron Bridge]

Solar is just about the least cost efficient means of mitigating carbon emissions. The most efficient (nuclear) is being rapidly abandoned by the Germans for inane reasons.

The basic problem:

- If solar nameplate capacity could replace fossil/nuclear nameplate capacity at a 1:1 ratio, it would increase electricity prices by 5-10x times. The German feed-in tariff for solar is about 10x the current wholesale price of electricity.

- It can't replace nameplate fossil/nuclear capacity because of intermittency that produces an as-yet unsolved time-shifting problem.

[Stark]

When you posted that, did you imagine you were adding something to the thread? Both sides of this debate is pretty well aware of such basic issues (even if they take widely different positions on their I pittance and resolution).

[Iron Bridge]

Meanwhile, in the real world not fogged by nuclear fanboy fantasies, actual detailed studies on the feasibility of having a renewable energy dominated infrastructure:

Wind and Solar Power Paired With Storage Could Power Grid 99.9 Percent of the Time

Go figure. Actual science and fact checking confirms a renewable energy infrastructure wiping the board against other power generation is quite feasible and cost effective.

1. This study doesn't compare renewable + batteries to an all-nuclear grid, so it doesn't tell us anthing about whether the renewable grid is preferable.

2. Their proposed grid only beats coal because they decide that coal electricity "should" cost 18c/kWh rather than the actual wholesale price of 3-4c/kWh. They may well be right that coal "should" be that expensive - that depends heavily on how much you think climate change damage is worth which creates high uncertainty - but it is wrong to say this study produces a renewable grid with wholesale prices within 5x of the current wholesale electricity price, let alone "wiping the board" with it.

3. "Fact checking" seems to now mean finding any scrap of objective cover for saying whatever you wanted to say to start with.

[LaCroix]

Well, first of all it has actually increased hunger all over the world as the price of grain etc. skyrocketed due to more farmers converting to biofuel. That is the first - not directly an environmental impact but one that IMO is significant nonetheless. Then, we got the problem of Biogas being somewhat bad for the soil in terms of usage and dust creation as well as the usage of fertilizer and its effect on water etc.

So it is still overall better IMO than fossil fuel but it does have an impact which is not insignificant.

It is much better when it is done with manure - there is a lot of methane produced just by storing it, which every farm has to do for quite a long time. Thus, it has double benefit - energy creation and less methane emmissions. Lots of big farms do this, already.

[Singular Intellect]

1. This study doesn't compare renewable + batteries to an all-nuclear grid, so it doesn't tell us anthing about whether the renewable grid is preferable.

Really? Oh, well allow me to get you up to speed on current news then: there's a huge public outcry and resistance to nuclear power and people are not for it. On the other hand, there is enormous public support for solar power as a green and clean energy source for the future.

Is there any part of that factual assessment do you not understand as indicating one system as more preferable over the other?

2. Their proposed grid only beats coal because they decide that coal electricity "should" cost 18c/kWh rather than the actual wholesale price of 3-4c/kWh. They may well be right that coal "should" be that expensive - that depends heavily on how much you think climate change damage is worth which creates high uncertainty - but it is wrong to say this study produces a renewable grid with wholesale prices within 5x of the current wholesale electricity price, let alone "wiping the board" with it.

That's because as far as I'm concerned, the study is extremely conservative on how cheap and efficient newer solar technologies will be, nor accounting for rapid advances of energy storage technologies. This is to be expected. I highly doubt the study would be taken seriously unless it was extremely conservative about technological innovation and developments.

3. "Fact checking" seems to now mean finding any scrap of objective cover for saying whatever you wanted to say to start with.

By fact checking, I mean addressing the false and dishonest claims renewable energy infrastructure cannot ever meet all our energy needs (I'd assert 99.9% fits that definition), including projections of energy needs of the future.

[Iron Bridge]

1. This study doesn't compare renewable + batteries to an all-nuclear grid, so it doesn't tell us anthing about whether the renewable grid is preferable.

Really? Oh, well allow me to get you up to speed on current news then: there's a huge public outcry and resistance to nuclear power and people are not for it. On the other hand, there is enormous public support for solar power as a green and clean energy source for the future.

Is there any part of that factual assessment do you not understand as indicating one system as more preferable over the other?

Your claim was that renewables were cheaper, implicitly than a nuclear grid although you didn't quite say that. If your argument is actually that uneducated people would oppose a nuclear grid even if it's technically and economically superior, that may be true, but I hope you see it's not a good reason not to adopt a nuclear grid.

Furthermore I do not believe people will continue to support a solar grid when it reaches a higher proportion of total generation and the electricity bills increase two, five, perhaps ten times. People have a markedly reduced tendancy to stay irrational when money is involved.

2. Their proposed grid only beats coal because they decide that coal electricity "should" cost 18c/kWh rather than the actual wholesale price of 3-4c/kWh. They may well be right that coal "should" be that expensive - that depends heavily on how much you think climate change damage is worth which creates high uncertainty - but it is wrong to say this study produces a renewable grid with wholesale prices within 5x of the current wholesale electricity price, let alone "wiping the board" with it.

That's because as far as I'm concerned, the study is extremely conservative on how cheap and efficient newer solar technologies will be, nor accounting for rapid advances of energy storage technologies. This is to be expected. I highly doubt the study would be taken seriously unless it was extremely conservative about technological innovation and developments.

The paper actually already added an arbitrary fudge factor for the renewable generation and storage to be cheaper in 2030 than today. Maybe your larger fudge factor is the accurate one but that isn't based in "actual science and fact checking," rather in wishful thinking.

3. "Fact checking" seems to now mean finding any scrap of objective cover for saying whatever you wanted to say to start with.

By fact checking, I mean addressing the false and dishonest claims renewable energy infrastructure cannot ever meet all our energy needs (I'd assert 99.9% fits that definition), including projections of energy needs of the future.

I wouldn't make that claim. We could, technically speaking, build a 100% solar grid and use fly-wheels and batteries and pumped storage to smooth out intermittency. The problem is this would cost like the entire GDP of the country to build and price a lot of people out of the electricity market entirely.

[aerius]

Just for comparison, Bruce Nuclear cost $14.4 billion and has a generating capacity of 6.2GW. If we cost it out it works out to about 2.2 cents/kWh since U3O8 prices have been in the $50-60 range in recent years. If we assume economies of scale from standardized reactor designs and various other cost optimizations I bet we can get the cost under 2 cents/kWh. Which is 1/3 the price of the best case scenario in the study.

[mr friendly guy]

Well, first of all it has actually increased hunger all over the world as the price of grain etc. skyrocketed due to more farmers converting to biofuel. That is the first - not directly an environmental impact but one that IMO is significant nonetheless. Then, we got the problem of Biogas being somewhat bad for the soil in terms of usage and dust creation as well as the usage of fertilizer and its effect on water etc.

So it is still overall better IMO than fossil fuel but it does have an impact which is not insignificant.

I thought biogas refers to things like faeces, dead organic material being used as an energy source, while what you are referring to (ie planting crops which can be converted in liquid fuels) is biofuels. AFAIK the two terms are not interchangeable. Biogas is potentially environmentally beneficial for various reasons - eg animal faeces from livestock is used for energy instead of discharging it into rivers, the biomass is used to prevent methane production (which is more heat retaining than carbon dioxide), and instead of burning wood charcoal for fire in developing nations, you can substitute bamboo for trees which allows you to preserve trees.

That being said, I can't imagine biogas having a major impact in urban areas where most people will be living in the future. For example China estimates biogas takes up a mere 1.2 percent of its total energy use.

Now biofuels can have problems with farmers planting biofuels instead of food crops. You can ameliorate this to some extent by planting in areas which won't support crops, eg polluted land. For example a joint Australian and Chinese collaboration is trying to do just that.
Again I can't see them replacing much fossil fuels, but every little bit counts I guess.

[Thanas]

Well, first of all it has actually increased hunger all over the world as the price of grain etc. skyrocketed due to more farmers converting to biofuel. That is the first - not directly an environmental impact but one that IMO is significant nonetheless. Then, we got the problem of Biogas being somewhat bad for the soil in terms of usage and dust creation as well as the usage of fertilizer and its effect on water etc.

So it is still overall better IMO than fossil fuel but it does have an impact which is not insignificant.

I thought biogas refers to things like faeces, dead organic material being used as an energy source, while what you are referring to (ie planting crops which can be converted in liquid fuels) is biofuels.

They are pretty much synonymous in public debate over here, but thanks for the correction.