While US Sleeps, Germany Builds the Renewable World
November 18, 2012
I’ve posted many times about the German experiment in renewables. They keep charging ahead while we dither. Thanks Tea Party!
The nuclear industry and its supporters pounced on Merkel’s decision. They predicted blackouts on a scale Germany hadn’t experienced since World War II and skyrocketing electricity prices that would wreck the nation’s heavy manufacturing sector, the bedrock of the German economy. They warned that Germany would cease to be an energy exporter and be forced to import electricity from, of all places, French nuclear power plants. Utilities would have to burn more coal to make up for the lost nuclear power, they said, pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The British weekly The Economist branded Merkel’s action “a lunatic gamble.”
More than a year and a half later, however, those dire predictions haven’t materialized.
There have been no blackouts since Merkel’s announcement. On the contrary, Germany’s grid, which was already the most reliable in Europe, experienced a total of just 15 minutes and 31 seconds of brownouts in 2011, an improvement over 2010. (The comparable figure for the United States is measured in hours.) The wholesale price of electricity has gone down, not up. The electricity-intensive German manufacturing sector is still thriving. And Germany finished 2011 as a net exporter of energy, while also cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2 percent.
How did the critics get it so wrong? According to many German energy experts, the naysayers couldn’t envision how the new energy economy would work. Rainer Baake, who brokered the original plan to phase out nuclear, said the critics didn’t understand that while a single source of renewable energy can’t match the constant power of a coal or nuclear plant, a mix of renewable sources can achieve a similar result. For example, solar power produces a predictable range of energy during the day, while winds blow primarily at night. Getting the mix right isn’t easy. But so far, Baake argued, Germany’s experience suggests that it is possible.
–
Still, more needs to be done to make a smooth transition to a renewable energy economy. The antiquated power system must become more flexible and nimble, able to respond quickly to demand, something the old system wasn’t designed to do, Rainer Baake stressed. For all practical purposes, coal and nuclear power have only two settings: off and on. Supporters of the Energiewende argue that this limitation is another reason to stop using coal and nuclear. “The Big Four were right about one thing,” Baake admitted. “You have to choose between the old system and the new one. And we have chosen renewables.”
Kadner seemed especially proud of one achievement—a comprehensive “lifecycle analysis” establishing how much CO2 each energy source produces from manufacturing to disposal. Using the largest data set ever compiled, researchers determined that, compared to fossil fuels, renewables sources such as wind and solar power released 10 to 100 times less CO2 per unit of energy.
In practical terms, Kadner said, “What we found was that if you want to mitigate climate change, first, renewable energies can play a role. And second, they have to play a role.”
Kadner and her colleagues calculated that of the 300 gigawatts of new electrical generating capacity built throughout the world between 2008 and 2009, 140 gigawatts—nearly half the total—came from renewables. (An average size nuclear reactor produces one gigawatt of electricity)
Such a massive power shift may sound impossible to those of us from the United States, where giant oil and coal corporations control the energy industry and the very idea of human-caused climate change is still hotly contested. Here in Germany, that debate is long over. A dozen years of growing public support have driven all major political parties to endorse the Energiewende. If a member of parliament called climate change a hoax or said that its cause is unknown, he or she would be laughed out of office.
“The fight now, to the extent that there is one, is over the speed of the transition,” Jens Kendzia told me as we stood on the Reichstag roof. Kendzia is chief of staff for a leader of the center-left Green Party, which crafted the legislation responsible for the Energiewende‘s success.
In an interview later that day, Dr. Joachim Pfeiffer, a leading spokesman for the center-right Christian Democrats, boasted about the Energiewende‘s progress under his party.
“We’ll definitely get to 35 percent renewable power by 2020,” he said, referring to the next official target. “In fact, we’ll probably reach 40 percent.”
–
Twenty-five percent of Germany’s electricity now comes from solar, wind and biomass. A third of the world’s installed solar capacity is found in Germany, a nation that gets roughly the same amount of sunlight as Alaska. A whopping 65 percent of the country’s total renewable power capacity is now owned by individuals, cooperatives and communities, leaving Germany’s once all-powerful utilities with just a sliver (6.5 percent) of this burgeoning sector.
–
The U.S. wasn’t always so timid. Thirty years ago, we led the world in renewable energy research and production, and Jimmy Carter’s White House was the first government building in the world to install solar panels on its roof. Ursula Sladek, a resident of the tiny Black Forest village of Schönau, remembers reading about the installation project in the 1970s, when the United States was hit by soaring oil prices and gasoline shortages. Sladek, an elementary school teacher married to the village doctor, marveled at America’s resilience, ingenuity and spirit—and at President Carter’s vision.
The panels were unceremoniously hauled down by President Ronald Reagan a few years later, of course, and the image of Carter in a wool cardigan counseling his fellow citizens to dial back their thermostats to conserve energy became an object of ridicule in the United States.
But Sladek—like most of the Germans I met—never got the joke. For them, the peanut farmer from Georgia, who tried to chart a new energy future for America, became the unlikely inspiration for their Energiewende.
–
I finished with the one question I asked in almost every interview: What lessons can the United States learn from Germany’s Energiewende?
The question took her by surprise. She looked around the room at what had been accomplished by a handful of ordinary citizens. “This is something very American, isn’t it? ” she said. “The Americans are people who say: ‘We can do it ourselves.'”
Sladek paused. Then she spoke slowly and simply like the schoolteacher she once was. “You can’t wait for what you want to come from above,” she said. “We are here. We can do something. And so, we begin.”
According to predictions by leading experts, prices for producing solar power will continue to decrease. “One can safely assume costs for solar energy will drop by one third until 2020,” said Philippe Welter, analyst and editor of the magazine Photon, which focuses on solar issues.
According to this, prices for solar energy from small-scale plants in Germany could fall to eight euro cents. Energy produced by big-scale plants in South Europe to four to five euro cents. This would make solar energy even cheaper than coal.
Solar energy would become especially lucrative for direct consumption. Today, German consumers pay about 25 euro cents per kilowatt hour to use power from the grid. That’s about 10 euro cents more than they would pay for solar power from a new installation on their rooftop. If energy prices continue to rise like they have in the past, German households would be paying about 40 euro cents per kilowatt hour for power from the grid by 2025. According to Welter’s calculations, it would be only 8 euro cents per kilowatt hour for solar power from a new installation.
The trend will be similar in other countries worldwide, says Christian Breyer, CEO of the Reiner Lemoine Institute in Berlin. By 2025, solar power will be cheaper than power from the grid in 90 percent of all countries.
Climate Denial Crock of the Week 
November 18, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Two articles from Damian Carrimgton in the British Guardian:
Only renewables – not nuclear – could be too cheap to meter
Busting the carbon and cost myths of Germany’s nuclear exit
November 19, 2012 at 4:13 pm
mrsircharles, I’ve read Mr. Carrington’s blog before, and I consider it to be an unreliable source of information. He is very much an advocate, and as such does not hew to the strictest standards of intellectual integrity. The German experiment is of profound importance to the entire world, but it is much too early to be drawing conclusions from it. There’s a huge difference between renewables as augmentation and renewables as base load. The Germans are just now starting to bump into that distinction, and they need time to develop the management strategies for optimizing the use of renewables.
The ironic thing about Mr. Carrington’s first entry is his use of the phrase “too cheap to meter”, now a source of ridicule for the blind technological optimism it represents. Yet Mr. Carrington then commits the same intellectual sin with renewables, insinuating that they might be too cheap to meter. The original quote comes from the 1950s, before we had developed experience with nuclear on a large scale. We’re in exactly the same position now with wind and solar PV. Yes, we have the technology working — we had nuclear technology working in the 1950s. What we didn’t have back then with nuclear, and don’t have yet with solar PV and wind, is lots of experience with managing these technologies on a large scale.
Again, Germany is doing humanity a gigantic service by carrying out this experiment, and I very much hope they succeed, and if they do, I hope they reap the rewards of their entrepreneurial courage. My guess — and it’s only a guess — is that they’ll fail to achieve 100% renewable, but will demonstrate that some percentage of total electricity generation works. How big is that percentage? It depends on a lot of factors, many of which are still not yet well understood. I think it’s safe to say that 10% works well in Germany. As Germany gets more experience, that number will move upwards. But let’s not jump the gun and start talking “too cheap to meter”.
November 18, 2012 at 9:32 pm
[…] I’ve posted many times about the German experiment in renewables. They keep charging ahead while we dither. Thanks Tea Party! BusinessWeek: The nuclear industry and its supporters pounced on Merkel’s decision. They predicted blackouts on a scale Germany hadn’t experienced since World War II and skyrocketing electricity prices that would wreck the nation’s heavy manufacturing sector, the bedrock of the German economy. They warned that Germany would cease to be an energy exporter and be forced to import electricity from, of all places, French nuclear power plants. Utilities would have to burn more coal to make up for the lost nuclear power, they said, pumping huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The British weekly The Economist branded Merkel’s action “a lunatic gamble.” More than a year and a half later, however, those dire predictions haven’t materialized. There have been no blackouts since Merkel’s announcement. On the contrary, Germany’s grid, which was already the most reliable in Europe, experienced a total of just 15 minutes and 31 seconds of brownouts in 2011, an improvement over 2010. (The comparable figure for the United States is measured in hours.) The wholesale price of electricity has gone down, not up. The electricity-intensive German manufacturing sector is still thriving. And Germany finished 2011 as a net exporter of energy, while also cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2 percent. […]
November 18, 2012 at 10:12 pm
Do we have any numbers on the changes in German output of electricity from various sources? I’d be especially interested in seeing whether their coal stations did indeed increase output. And I’d love to know more about the relative contributions of solar and wind.
One other thing: Germany was a net exporter of electricity, but what do we know about its export/import ratios? To what, if any, extent, were they relying on foreign electricity in the worst load crunches?
November 18, 2012 at 10:33 pm
http://www.wind-works.org/FeedLaws/Germany/GermanCoal-FiredGenerationofElectricityFallsWhileRenewableGenerationRises.html
http://www.wind-works.org/FeedLaws/Germany/GermanyContinuesExportingElectricityDespiteClosingReactors.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-21/germany-s-green-drive-subdues-2013-power-prices-energy-markets.html
http://www.wind-works.org/FeedLaws/France/RenewablesHelpedFranceAvoidFreezingintheDark.html
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/10/08/german-baseload-power-cheaper-than-french-12-months-running/
November 19, 2012 at 12:03 am
Thanks for the links. I went through them all and there were a few discrepancies that threw me at first. For example, several of the links state the Germany gets 20% of its electricity from renewables, but the IEA statistics show less than 10%. I think that the discrepancy is over capacity versus generation, i.e, renewables account for 20% of German capacity, but less than 10% of its electricity generated.
The price differential between the German electricity and the French electricity is particularly telling, although again there’s the problem that so much of the German electricity supply is coal, so it’s impossible to ascribe the lower German price to renewables.
A tiny fraction of the German electricity is state-subsidized, so that’s a hidden cost that needs to be factored in. As yet, it seems the data available to us don’t provide us with clear answers as yet. I think that it’s wonderful that Germany is carrying out this large-scale experiment; one way or the other, within ten years we’ll have solid data with which to guide our own decision-making.
November 19, 2012 at 6:50 am
Sorry,the website is in Dutch but the numbers for Q3/2011/2012 are as follows:
Wind 8%8.6%
Solar 6.1 %
Biomass 5.8%
Hydro 3.8%
Garbage & others 0.9%
Total 25.2% of electricity production
http://polderpv.nl/nieuws_PV100.htm#8nov2012_QIII_BRD_zonnestroom_productie
November 19, 2012 at 7:05 am
Sorry
One more time
http://polderpv.nl/nieuws_PV100.htm#8nov2012_QIII_BRD_zonnestroom_productie
Wind 8% / 8.6%
Solar 4.1% / 6.1 %
Biomass 5.4% / 5.8%
Hydro 3.3 % / 3.8%
Garbage & others 0.9% / 0.9%
Total 21.7% / 25.2% of total electricity use
November 19, 2012 at 3:54 pm
heijdensejan, are these the percentages of electrical production for the Netherlands in Q3, the first number being for 2011 and the second for 2012? If so, two elements of them strike me as interesting.
Far and away the most interesting, to me, is the existence of ANY hydroelectricity in the Netherlands. With the highest point in the Netherlands being about 100 meters high (and I myself have ascended that lofty peak), I cannot imagine any place where a dam could be built. So I did some searching and came across this website:
http://www.microhydropower.net/nl/index_uk.php
By golly, there really is hydropower in the Netherlands! Amazing! One problem: it states that hydropower output in the Netherlands is ten times greater than solar PV output. Perhaps the page is outdated; I don’t know what to think.
The other observation that leaps out at me is the consistency of the increase from 2011 to 2012. This is particularly salient with hydropower, which doesn’t increase rapidly (most hydro projects take a long time to build). This suggests that the primary force at work is reduction of demand. Do you have absolute numbers of GWh production for 2011 and 2012?
November 19, 2012 at 4:18 pm
heijdensejan, I just went back and checked the IEA numbers, and they flatly contradict the numbers you have. Here are their numbers for total electricity production in the Netherlands in 2011:
Combustible fuels: 99,257 GWh
Nuclear: 3,908 GWh
Hydro: 57 GWh
Geothermal/Wind/Solar/Other: 5,321 GWh
Imports: 20,621 GWh
Exports: 11,530 GWh
The data also show that electricity production was lower this year than last year, which supports my earlier speculation regarding the increase in percentages.
November 18, 2012 at 10:35 pm
I got a few numbers here:
http://www.iea.org/stats/surveys/elec_archives.asp
I looked at the most recent figures and it appears that coal output increased in 2012 to absorb about 60% to 70% of the shortfall created by the loss of nuclear. The solar/wind/geothermal contribution increased by 27%, a big leap, but it looks to me as if this sector took up only about of the third of the nuclear shortfall.
In absolute terms, coal is still supplying nearly half of German electricity, nuclear about 10%, and solar/wind/geo a smidge less than nuclear.
So there’s no question of the correctness of the predictions that a reduction in German nuclear capacity would result in an increase in coal use — so far. If the Germans continue on the path they’re now on, they should start reducing coal use within five years.
It’s difficult to interpret the numbers for trade, but it appears that Germany traded about 70 TWh, with a small net surplus.
November 21, 2012 at 8:01 pm
More detailed numbers here:
Click to access stromproduktion-aus-solar-und-windenergie-2012.pdf
It looks like coal use is indeed up a bit to replace most of the loss of nuclear but where renewables really have an effect is on gas use which is down by quite a bit. This is not strange if you consider the merit order (gas is more expensive then coal, coal is also less flexible). The figures really show how much renewables reduce (the most expensive) peak gas generation during midday and at times even start to make a small dent in coal use.
November 19, 2012 at 4:37 pm
I’d like to offer a general comment, starting with a story. On election night a few weeks ago, the Republicans confidently awaited the victory they had been expecting. Mr. Romney himself was so certain of victory that he didn’t even bother preparing a concession speech. As the election results came in, the Republicans simply could not believe what they were seeing. Karl Rove had something of an on-air meltdown, refusing to accept the data that were coming in. They were shocked by the results; the most common reaction was along the lines of “How could this be happening?!?!?!”
This happened because the Republicans had succumbed to confirmation bias: believing the evidence they wanted to believe and rejecting the evidence they didn’t like. With Fox News as their sole source of information, they had been living in their own happy little bubble. Then reality came along and popped their bubble.
I notice similar confirmation bias among the commentators on this blog. We get lots of supporting evidence presented, and seldom see contradictory evidence. You — as a group — are making the same mistake that the Republicans made, and you’re heading for the same shock they experienced. This is complicated stuff, and it’s all too easy to cherry-pick the evidence you like and minimize (or even ignore) the evidence you don’t like.
This behavior is not just understandable, it’s to be expected. Whenever a group of people form a bond, they do so under some social aegis that defines their relationships. This blog is about climate change, and this social group consists of people who believe (rightly) that climate change is a major threat to human well-being and that something must be done about it. This something is the reduction of carbon emissions, replacing them with something else, and renewables are the obvious alternative. Hence, being a member of this group creates a social pressure to cheer for renewables and boo-hiss fossil fuels.
If you read the writings of American political thinkers in the run-up to the Constitution, you’ll see that they hit upon a fundamental solution to political prudence: insure that a motley collection of competing interest groups were always squabbling over politics. That intellectual competition would keep politics honest. Freedom of speech wasn’t so much a right as a necessity. We NEED dissenters to keep us honest. When we squelch dissent, we make ourselves more stupid.
But social dynamics collide with intellectual necessities; the social dynamics call for group loyalty where intellectual integrity demands dissent. This conflict can only be resolved by adamant resolve to look at every possible contrary argument. I urge each of you to search your soul and ask yourself if you’re doing what feels good or what’s intellectually necessary.
December 19, 2012 at 9:28 pm
[…] While US Sleeps, Germany Builds the Renewable World […]
February 5, 2013 at 1:03 pm
[…] the German experience is a guide, it will yet be a long time before any lack of storage is a limiting factor on deployment of renewable energy in the […]