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. . . Germany is now paying folks to take Electricity on some Weekends.
That's pretty sly..... It's not "folks", the article states commercial users.
The excessive power is actually showing the limitations of renewables, you have an ideal day and the investment goes out the window without the means to store it. Meanwhile on a cloudy and windless day fire up the coal plants....another investment that is not being utilized to it's full extent.
That's pretty sly..... It's not "folks", the article states commercial users.
The excessive power is actually showing the limitations of renewables, you have an ideal day and the investment goes out the window without the means to store it. Meanwhile on a cloudy and windless day fire up the coal plants....another investment that is not being utilized to it's full extent.
That's a fair point, I think. To use intermittent renewables, a town needs essentially TWO power plants instead of just one. The renewable plant still needs a fossil fuel backup plant. Or an expensive battery storage unit. Or something.
So even if renewables reach parity (on price per watt) with fossil fuels, you end up needing "double" the investment for the same overall capacity.
That's a fair point, I think. To use intermittent renewables, a town needs essentially TWO power plants instead of just one. The renewable plant still needs a fossil fuel backup plant. Or an expensive battery storage unit. Or something.
So even if renewables reach parity (on price per watt) with fossil fuels, you end up needing "double" the investment for the same overall capacity.
This isn't the way a grid operates. The notion that you need 100% backup for renewables is just not reality. Most people don't know that we already operate with several thousand megawatts of online reserve in case a large nuke goes down so a cloud going across the face of a 5 kw pv cell is just a little noise in the system.
That's pretty sly..... It's not "folks", the article states commercial users.
The excessive power is actually showing the limitations of renewables, you have an ideal day and the investment goes out the window without the means to store it. Meanwhile on a cloudy and windless day fire up the coal plants....another investment that is not being utilized to it's full extent.
Good points.
Germany is flooding the European grid with excess energy on the good days: Poland and Czech Republic (?) have threatened to shut off access to their systems. That excess can overload the system and cause it to go down--think of the electric power & grid as water in a system of canals. If you open the flood gates in Germany, they'll spill over the limits of the system in Poland, etc.
You still must maintain back-up with fossil fuel for quick start-up response on the days & nites when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.
Storage? I'd rather live next to a nuclear plant that can easily disengage the fuel rods rather than next to a battery with the capacity to store "industrial sized" amounts of electric power. That would be like living next to a gasoline storage facility that uses gas lamps for lighting.
Maybe we should just be copying Germany's homework, and ignore our various Billionaires and wannabes?
Sherlock Holmes would view this comment and conclude like many of us already have that the liberal interest in environmentalism is dominated by their agenda for economic transformation of the world. Greens are really Reds.
This isn't the way a grid operates. The notion that you need 100% backup for renewables is just not reality. Most people don't know that we already operate with several thousand megawatts of online reserve in case a large nuke goes down so a cloud going across the face of a 5 kw pv cell is just a little noise in the system.
Leave these decisions to the professionals.
Spinning reserve and non spin reserve most if not always a fossil fuel fired asset.............
Your comment displays your ignorance. See my previous post about the problem of excess power production.
Guido, Philip is a professional engineer in the business. On his worst day he knows many time what you will ever understand about energy. Stick to protology.
As I previously stated, spinning reserve is sized based upon the largest plant on the system. That is typically a two unit nuclear plant that will often be about 2000 MW. That amount of power will be available 24/7 regardless of the existence of wind, pv, et al, which are all way smaller than our large central station plants. The reserve has zero marginal cost to the renewable resource.
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