Why do so few countries in Europe follow Germany in green electricity? The answer could lie in electricity prices:
Eurostat lists these for the first half of 2020. Of all countries, Germany, Denmark and the United Kingdom are the wind energy countries that are very far ahead in terms of consumer prices. Hat-tip Die kalte Sonne.
Wind, sun absent extended periods
Not only has electricity gotten expensive in these countries, but the supply is highly unreliable. Germany’s massive 110 GW of installed sun and wind energy capacity produced next to nothing over a period of five days earlier this month, not even coming close to meeting the country’s demand:
Or during the dead of winter, when power is in big demand, see below for a period two weeks:
Charts: Agora Energiewende
300,000 households lose power
Fortunately there were fossil and nuclear power plants available to keep the power grid from collapsing. But there’s a problem: It’s very uneconomical to operate these conventional plants only part-time. The added costs end up being borne by the consumer.
And due to the high electricity rates, every year tens of thousands of German households see their power cut off due to unpaid electricity bills, read here and here.
Wind in the Oregon/Wash region has come and gone this week. Started from near Zero on the 22nd, low bounces 3 times, and peaking 3 times. Then at Noon on Friday wind dropped and stayed low for the day, followed by a short high-peak. Now it is dropping again, below velocity to pump out electrons.
Live (5 minute updates) here:
BPA Balancing Authority Load and Total Wind Generation
Note Hydro (blue line) and Nuclear (purple line).
One of the reasons for the high costs can be seen in this chart.
https://energy-charts.info/charts/installed_power/chart.htm?l=en&c=DE
Germany has installed a huge amount of wid/solar but has kept traditional generation at virtually the same level but has replaced a big chunk of nuclear with gas and biomass; not lignite as many people believe
The reason that German electricity costs so much is NOT because their cost of power generation is high
It is high because of the cost of TRANSMISSION costs just as in the USA typically
The generation/production are always less than 50% of your bill
And of course German labor is quite costly which also adds to the consumers bill
Why not compare generation costs and then tell us how renewables can’t compete
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