If you’re like me, some of you will recall that old favorite tune the old man used to listen to on AM radio back in the 60s and 70s: “Lazy-Hazy-Crazy Days Of Summer.
Germany’s 31 gigawatt capacity wind parks have been idled by weeks of summer wind doldrums, causing spot market electricity prices to soar. Source: Philip May, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Such wonderful summer days are pretty much what we have been having in Central Europe this month. A massive high has been delivering lots of sunshine and warm temperatures. It’s been great. But for wind park operators, this month unfortunately has been a disaster as winds have been lazy too – stuck in the doldrums for weeks now.
Spot-market prices have soared
This has led to less electricity getting pumped into the grid, and so consequently spot market prices have jumped to their highest levels since May. So reports the German media. In the end, it’s the consumer who is going to have to take over the costs associated with idled windparks.
T-Online writes:
As ‘Focus Online’ reports, referring to energy data service Point Carbon, the electricity price on the spot market (for next-day delivery) reached the highest level in 8 weeks. At 51.50 euros per megawatt hour it reached a high price that was last seen on the German exchange EEX last May.”
Last Wednesday, for example, of the 31 gigawatts of installed wind capacity, only 1 gigawatt was being delivered – a measly 3%. This level of capacity utilization has been going on now for weeks.
Making things worse, an area of clouds kept solar energy output down as well early this week, causing a considerable shortfall in German power generation.
Power generation companies, however, refuse to re-fire conventional power plants because the higher prices still are not enough to cover the costs associated with intermittent operation of conventional plants. The added shortfall only result in prices staying sky-high.
In the end it’s the consumer who has to pay. Just imagine: we’ve got all this available capacity and potential supply, yet the prices keep skyrocketing. This is what happens when complete ideology-obsessed buffoons take over the management of anything.
The latest forecast shows the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer continuing at least another week, and with good indications they could be lasting through much of August. Let’s hope so…though it’s not going to help the electric bill.
O/T I finally found, via Soylent, an article that explains the Spanish “nationalization of the Sun”; i.e. punishing people with an up to 30 million EUR fine if they use sunlight for their own purposes without paying a tax.
Link
The main purpose seems to be to stop people from dropping off the grid. Self-sufficiency is now a crime in the EU ultrastate.
Also posted on WUWT as “Climate Craziness of the Week – taxing sunlight”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/26/climate-craziness-of-the-week-taxing-sunlight/
Well, why not?
Will someone tax breathing next? We exhale CO2, you know. What will be the punishment if you can’t pay?
An unhelpful suggestion: Close up Germany for a few weeks and do the tourist thing. The southern parts (Greece, Italy, Spain, . . .) can use the money. German electricity demand will go down and your southern neighbors can eat again. Win. Win.
Okay, sorry. Just having a little fun. Keeps one from going crazy while watching the politicians in the USA implode.
Germany becomes Detroit.
The makers depart, leaving only the takers.
The Energiewunde stings… RWE, E.On and Vattenfall have advised pending permanent shutdowns and the proposed removal of “mothballed” conventional generating plant from Germany to outside the EU. The reason is the preferred treatment of “renewable” energy which makes operating conventional plants uneconomic as they have to respond to the rapid fluctuation of and unpredictable availability of heavily subsidised renewables.
While the German regulatory authority requires notification, any demands to force operators to stay online or on standby will be at taxpayer expense. (That’s somewhere in the constitution; a consequence of basic rights.)
P.S. Pierre. Remember what I wrote earlier about periodically spraying a mist of (rain)water onto your PV installation? The increase in output should be evident almost immediately on a hot and dry day.
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