Germany sets new solar-power record

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/05/26/us-climate-germany-solar-idUKBRE84P0FI20120526

by siavosh • 14 years ago

269 219 14 years ago

uk.reuters.com

spenrose6• 14 years ago

Total world energy consumption is about 16 Terawatts. The article reports Germany's solar production peaked at 22 Gigawatts. That's over 0.1% of humanity's use, from a single country covering a land area smaller than California. We have just begun to exploit solar PV power generation.

eru• 14 years ago

> [...] from a single country covering a land area smaller than California.

To be more precise: From a single, cloudy and relatively cold country. California isn't really the right comparison.

spenrose6• 14 years ago

Apparently it was very sunny that day, and cool temps actually help PV efficiency IIRC.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

To be even more precise: during a period of only a few hours during an extremely sunny day.

adamt• 14 years ago

What is the "GW per hour" referenced several times in the article? Do they just mean GW or do they mean Gigawatt Hours?

chrisb• 14 years ago

They mean GW. Many news articles on this subject show irritating ignorance of energy/power and the correct use of units :(

GW per hour would be the rate of change of power generation, which is obviously incorrect given the context :)

uvdiv• 14 years ago

They mean gigawatts of power, at some specific time. Germany has about 24.8 GW [1] of installed solar capacity, which recently peaked about 22 GW of actual power. The time-average is about 2.1 GW as of last year [1] (as 18 TWh/year), because solar panels in Germany only yield about 10-12% of their capacity averaged over the day and year. [a] So this is about the same as a (one) large nuclear reactor in electricity generated, but not peak power.

Incidentally it's cost about €100 billion [2] to build this, at taxpayer expense. (Though this a future-spending figure: the subsidies aren't paid at the time a power plant is built, but deferred over 20 years -- the present value is somewhat lower). The specific subsidy rates are listed here [3] (they're set by the year the plant is installed).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/inflated-incenti...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_incentives_for_photov...

[a] Note that the installed capacity increased a lot over 2011, so you can't do simple comparisons like dividing 2.1/24.8 -- a lot of the capacity wasn't installed at the beginning of the year, and was at the end. But see the example capacity factors in the power plant table in [1]

blubbar4• 14 years ago

>€100 billion [2] to build this, at taxpayer expense.

At energy consumers expense to be precise. 100 billion € sound scary, but it's just adds another 8,2% to the incredibly expensive German electricity bill.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strompreis

ScottBurson2• 14 years ago

I suppose they could correctly say "GWh per hour", but it's simpler to just say "GW".

Eduard• 14 years ago

At night, Germany's solar power equals 0 nuclear plants.

ThomPete• 14 years ago

Actually at night it equals 10 :)

spenrose6• 14 years ago

That's true. Fortunately: (1) it's always sunny somewhere (2) we are increasing our ability to store power (3) industrialized countries use less power at night.

skylan_q• 14 years ago

His point is that if one depends too heavily on solar, there are times when they'll have no access to power. How does one transport solar power from Japan to Germany?

alexott• 14 years ago

somewhere... I'm living at north of NRW, and this spring wasn't sunny at all - only last week was sunny here, while 3 first week of May were rainy :-(

SagelyGuru11• 14 years ago

This is not a fair argument. When a nuclear reactor is being inspected, re-stocked, checked, repaired, refurbished, its output equals zero solar panels.

Fukushima's output has been equal to zero solar panels for over a year, despite its incomparably greater cost.

khuey• 14 years ago

The amount of time a nuclear reactor is offline for inspection, refueling, repair, etc is far less than the amount of time it is dark.

lostlogin4• 14 years ago

When it by earthquake/tsunami I know which plant I'd prefer to be near. The pacific rim would not seem ideal for nuclear power.

Eeko3• 14 years ago

Which?

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/20/us-japan-nuclear-t...

Most of those things are by-design made to be sturdy as fuck. And so far, no-one has died from Fuku-radiation?

lispm4• 14 years ago

At night the demand for electricity is significantly lower.

Germany is developing the whole range of renewable energy including new storage options.

Not just solar.

yaix• 14 years ago

Wrong. The energy from solar power can be stored in water reservoirs and that water can be used at night to generate power.

majmun• 14 years ago

How many energy was consumed building this thing? and in what time will this power plant produce same amount of energy?

revelation• 14 years ago

That's a pointless metric. Not all energy is created equal, if you will.

maebert• 14 years ago

Can't tell you that, but here's an interesting article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparisons_of_life-cycle_green...

Basically, Greenhouse gas emission including construction, material acquisition, maintenance etc. per kWh im g CO2: Solar: 32 Nuclear: 66 (which assumes that enrichment is done with conventional energy)\ Coal: 960

morsch• 14 years ago

This page [0] discusses this question. It's in German but the Google translation is not bad. The energy required to produce both solar and wind energy has decreased significantly in recent years.

Solar power in Germany (the page claims) takes between 15 - 100 months to generate as much energy as producing them takes. I assume 100 is for old panels, and with modern (=more efficiently produced) panels it's more like 15. Wind power takes just 3 - 23 months to establish this "energy payback".

The page has more detailed figures and sources.

[0] http://www.volker-quaschning.de/datserv/kev/index.php

jws2• 14 years ago

About 1 to 2 years. Highly variable by technology.

There is a persistent myth that solar panels take more energy to fabricate than they produce in their lifetime. It is shown false with minimal effort (consider if the entire cost of a panel was energy. no labor, not capital equipment overhead, no raw materials… they still have payback periods shorter than their lifetimes).

vilda2• 14 years ago

For the newest, most efficient panels, it's about 5 years.

nextparadigms• 14 years ago

Although many of the Fukushima stories may have been sensationalist I welcomed them. Because in a way nuclear energy generation is also a status quo industry and an idea, although less so than coal. But we needed something to nudge people into wanting solar power, even over nuclear. The more demand there is for it, the more research will be made for it, and new ways will be found to make solar more efficient and cheaper.

We already hear about such new discoveries every few months now. Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in this, and the potential is enormous.

DanBC3• 14 years ago

What's wrong with nuclear?

Concentration on solar is great but has some sub-optimalities. Concentration on an energy industry that could also provide materials for a cold war arms race was clearly a bad idea.

Why aren't people working on thorium reactors?

lliiffee• 14 years ago

Interesting. Are you saying that the technology for thorium reactors wouldn't be so closely related to weapons technology?

cygx5• 14 years ago

Why aren't people working on thorium reactors?

Wikipedia lists current projects in the US (~2015), India (~2013) and China (~?).

The reason for India's interest in the technology should be obvious, and it's quite probable that we'll see further development on that front.

pgeorgi2• 14 years ago

Concentration on solar is a media myth - maybe because, next to wind mills, photovoltaics is the most visible generator, and unlike wind mills (quite expensive, lots of space needed), pretty much every house owner could invest a relatively modest amount to put PV on their roof.

IMHO the success story isn't solar, it's lots of tools (PV, wind, water, burning waste, storage) building an energy market with many participants where for nuclear, a few large corporations can control it all.

That's what's happening in Germany, and the Big Four definitely don't like that. It's not all roses, but I prefer the situation now over the several decades of subsidies + no liability for an industry club of 4.

bjelkeman-again• 14 years ago

What is wrong with nuclear is that it has not turned out to be cost effective relative other options. The Economist, which has had a strong pro-nuclear stance for decades recently changed its mind.

"Whether it comes to benefit from carbon pricing or not, nuclear power would be more competitive if it were cheaper. Yet despite generous government research-and-development programmes stretching back decades, this does not look likely." http://www.economist.com/node/21549936

And the special report on that: http://www.economist.com/node/21549098

spenrose6• 14 years ago

Nuclear doesn't play nice with big solar and wind because nuclear plants don't want to turn on and off rapidly. See http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/energy-futurist/why-baseload... an many others.

kijin3• 14 years ago

There are many ways to store leftover capacity so that nuclear plants can operate all the time even when combined with renewable sources. For example, you could use leftover capacity to drive pumped storage plants. Pump storage plants operate at 70-87% efficiency [1] and can produce gigawatts of power on demand (in fact, within seconds). They are effectively the largest batteries in the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

pjscott2• 14 years ago

There are types of nuclear plants that can load-follow much more easily, but it's not a design goal right now. The cost of nuclear energy is almost entirely construction and red tape; once you have a nuclear plant, the marginal cost of producing another megawatt-hour is so low that you want to run them as close to 100% as you can.

If more of our electricity came from nuclear, load-following would become more of a design priority. Or we would build some highly adjustable loads that can take a bunch of excess power when it's there, like aluminum smelting or electric car charging.

ori_b9• 14 years ago

There are already solutions for load balancing power. And these load balancing solutions for nuclear actually would be the same ones you'd need for wind and solar.

kijin3• 14 years ago

> Imagine if many more countries and Government were committed to solar energy and would make the solar industry boom because of it. We're still very early in this, and the potential is enormous.

Here's one possibility: Sunny countries will begin to make a lot of money generating solar power and selling it to cloudy countries. North Africa, for example, could easily support all of Europe's electricity needs if we find some way to keep sand off the solar panels. But all of that money goes into the pockets of African and Middle Eastern autocrats, and the world enters a new era where everyone tries to grab the sunniest parts of the world ... umm ... wait a second, those are the same areas where we're currently killing people for oil. tl;dr: History repeats itself.

But on the flip side, solar energy would allow humanity to make good use of some of the most barren parcels of real estate in the world. Instead of using fertile fields to produce biofuel, we could use those fields to produce actual food and leave power generation to places like Arizona.

gliese13372• 14 years ago

If we find some way to keep sand off the solar panels, and some way to efficiently transport it across the Mediterranean. That's certainly not impossible, but the technology for things like long-distance seafloor superconducting cables is even less mature than solar power plants.

It'd be way cool to see all of that come together In The Future, but in the near-term, surplus solar power in Africa is not going to help Europe, unless they use it indirectly by using solar electricity to synthesize oil or something.

stfu2• 14 years ago

There are already plans for making Africa the power generator of Europe: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec

SagelyGuru11• 14 years ago

Germany also has a lot of installed wind power which works at nights too. Plus new re-pumping hydro plants, which can be used to store the surplus energy of such peak solar output. So, with such diversification, the nuclear plants really are not necessary.

Plus with modern international energy trade, you get averaging benefits. I.e. when it is cloudy in your country, it may well be sunny in one of your neighbouring countries, so you can do instantaneous energy swaps like that, reducing the need for storage.

ralfd• 14 years ago

Sadly the nuclear plants in Germany, which provide 20% of the electricity, can not be replaced by renewables but only by coal and gas power plants.

SagelyGuru11• 14 years ago

Why not? Does not this directly contradict your statement? > Germany became a world leader in renewable energy and the country gets about 20 percent of its overall annual electricity from those sources.

sasvari2• 14 years ago

Germany has nearly as much installed solar power generation capacity as the rest of the world combined and gets about four percent of its overall annual electricity needs from the sun alone.

Despite the discussions in Germany about the high costs of PV for consumers, this still shows something remarkably: a (in general) not so sunny country in the northern hemisphere installed approximately half of the solar power capacity of the world. It's not easy, and even in Germany there are huge challenges lying ahead, but especially industrialized countries should take this as a sign to accelerate their own renewable energy strategies.

michaelbuckbee• 14 years ago

That's a very good insight that I didn't consider, it's as if Maine had achieved the highest level of PV usage in the US.

celoyd• 14 years ago

In fact, most of Germany gets less sunlight than most of Maine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Insolation.png

aaronblohowiak• 14 years ago

also, half of the pv capacity of the world is only 4% of the power needs for germany.

danielharan3• 14 years ago

growing > 50% CAGR in the last 5 years. Don't write it off just yet :)

riffraff• 14 years ago

let's not forget that renewable sources are not only solar panels, e.g. the US produces energy comparable to germany from wind (given populations) and the same has always been popular in, say, netherland or denmark. Or, Italy produces about 7% of the consumed energy from hydro alone, and I believe norway has about 99% of the energy produced from hydroelectric plants.

ams61102• 14 years ago

The 4% overall vs. 50% of these few hours illustrates the fundamental problem. Societies don't need electricity "for a few midday hours" on very clear, sunny days at a time of year where the sun is "in" the hemisphere. They need it more or less consistently all the time. Let's see how much electricity this massive investment is producing on a cloudy day in December.

sasvari2• 14 years ago

I don't see a 'fundamental' problem here at all. Yes, place the German solar panels in a region where the sun is shining more intensely and constantly over the whole year and you get a lot more power out of it. And IMHO _that_ is the problem: nations with these areas haven't installed this capacity, and effectively Germany is significantly responsible for the massive decline in the cost of PV.

So the question is: why hasn't a country with more and more intense sunlight hasn't done it? And why aren't they scaling up massively now, with the price of PV much much lower than when Germany decided to do it?

mvzink• 14 years ago

It really peeves me that there can be so little outcry (close to zero) and such immediate government action to shutdown nuclear plants when it's proven damn near impossible to get people to shut down coal plants. It's absurd. Coal is guaranteed to have costly negative health and environmental impacts on surrounding areas, while nuclear merely has the risk. I am glad something is being replaced by solar, but it is extremely aggravating that coal isn't getting the same treatment as nuclear.

spenrose6• 14 years ago

350.org and others are working on it -- help them!

stfu2• 14 years ago

The main difference is in my opinion the visible action - reaction relationship. If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie, while with coal plants you might have just people to "cough a bit more".

The only thing I do not get is why energy companies are not forced to carry more extensive insurance policies to the long term damages/risks they cause. Pushing this through all the way should provide enough incentives to move towards renewables.

SagelyGuru11• 14 years ago

The reason is that the costs of a failure of a nuclear power station are such that no insurance company would take on such a risk on commercial basis and even if they did, no energy company would be able/willing to pay the premiums.

It all works only because government(s) get their bombs, energy companies in cahoots with the government get their unrealistically low 'production costs' and the suckers taxpayers pay for any accidents and cleanups, whose costs are therefore never included in the accounting when making the comparisons.

German electors still have some say in the matter and they did their sums.

Eeko3• 14 years ago

> The main difference is in my opinion the visible action - reaction relationship. If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie, while with coal plants you might have just people to "cough a bit more".

Not really. Nuclear disasters are bad for the environment, but considerably less bad than say... Building a city somewhere.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120411084107.ht...

And "cough a bit more" is probably the understatement of a day. Those fuckers even create more radioactive waste (which won't get collected) when they work as intended, than nuclear plants when they break down. (http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is...)

You are on track with the insurance policy. Though it's pretty safe to assume, that real costs of coal and carbon-based fuels are not calculated very well for insurance purposes either.

The end-point of unstoppable climate-change could potentially render the entire earth inhabitable via the Venus-effect. Even most apocalyptic local consequences are pretty minor compared to those.

zizee• 14 years ago

If a nuclear power plant blows up, the whole area is going to look for years to come like a scene from a apocalyptic movie

Chernobyl is actually a wildlife wonderland now people can't live in the area. Animals don't deem to have a problem living in highly radioactive environments. They have more immediate issues than getting cancer. But for humans a nuclear meltdown is bad news.

So its not through environment that suffers on the whole, more that it is no longer suitable for humans.

But yes, the result of a nuclear disaster is much more dramatic in the short term, making it scarier than the same amount of damage that a coal powerplant dripfeeds.

deepGem• 14 years ago

What about Thorium based Molten Salt reactors. According to this article, they are potentially safe.

http://www.whatisnuclear.com/articles/thorium.html

danielharan3• 14 years ago

Coal is probably cheaper. Nuclear is very capital intensive, costs are usually more than estimated. Maintenance also regularly goes over budget and schedule.

Solar is increasingly cost-competitive. In my city there is at least one per block for the parking payment stations - it's cheaper than connecting them to the grid, even in the middle of the city.

As the costs of solar go down and we know we can close down plants, the political focus will shift to coal. I can't wait.

fennecfoxen• 14 years ago

In the US, utilities are switching over from coal to natural gas for electricity, on account of advances in fracking which make gas dirt cheap. (Some trucking firms are also trying to switch to LNG fuel, as diesel remains expensive). Combined with this anti-nuclear sentiment in Europe, this places the US in the hilariously ironic position of reducing carbon dioxide emissions more than Europe even though they never bothered to make that an explicit priority.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/05/americas-f...

excuse-me• 14 years ago

The current German government relies on a coalition involving some left wing union backed candidates in mining areas and the greens.

In US terms imagine you had to keep voters in Berkley and Pennsylvania happy

greedo4• 14 years ago

As I've stated before; solar and windpower are inadequate to provide for the power requirements of the western world. Oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear will be required if we want to maintain our current standard of living, nevermind the requirements imposed by developing countries.

Now you may be fine with cutting your energy requirements in half; bully for you. But don't be surprised if this isn't a popular idea for the rest of the world.

toemetoch2• 14 years ago

Coal is probably cheaper

Keep in mind that there are different types of coal, and choice normally depends on what is locally available / cheapest in volume. IIRC there's a lot of dirty lignite (Braunkohle) in Germany.

vilda2• 14 years ago

It's even worse - Angela Merkel responded in parliament that missing nuclear power plants will be replaces with NEW power plants on fossil fuel.

The problem with photovoltaic is that it needs 100% backup in traditional power plants.

drumdance• 14 years ago

The problem with iPhone batteries is they need 100% backup in recharging stations.

pgeorgi2• 14 years ago

There's not only photovoltaic but also wind turbines, water turbines, burning agricultural waste, and various means of storage to spread the harvest into weak times (though all of that has lots of potential for optimization, it's here now - sometimes for over 30 years).

Combined, this allows various providers in Germany to sell energy without resorting to fossil or nuclear fuel, right now.

The bad part (for big Energy Co.s and their buddy Angela Merkel) is that this way of doing things is too decentralized for the old oligopoly to keep an inherent edge over new entrants on the market.

Building and operating a nuclear plant (or even a coal plant, in highly regulated Germany) can't be pulled off by just anybody. Setting up solar or wind power, and scaling up over time is possible even on a much more limited budget.

batista2• 14 years ago

>It's absurd. Coal is guaranteed to have costly negative health and environmental impacts on surrounding areas, while nuclear merely has the risk.

Yes, but it has a much larger risk: the risk of tens or hundred of thousands of people getting radiation poisoning, and the region becoming inhabitable for years.

Plus it creates nuclear waste, that is not mere pollution, but extremely toxic for thousands or years. Not to mention the consequences to be had with a nuclear plant in the hands of the wrong people (terrorists and such). With a coal plant, not that many...

mxey• 14 years ago

For a hundred thousand years.

fforw2• 14 years ago

Nuclear plants also have guaranteed nuclear waste and Germany has no place to store these.

ori_b9• 14 years ago

People severely overestimate the volume of nuclear waste produced by a plant. Storing it is more of a political problem than a technical one.

jfoucher• 14 years ago

"22 gigawatts of electricity per hour" ?? WTF? As soon as I read that the credibilty of the whole post went waaay down...

But anyway, very cool.

archivator• 14 years ago

Maybe they meant gigawatts-hour, a unit of energy, although a bizarre one to use in any case.

mietek• 14 years ago

Why is it a bizarre unit? I'm billed for my electricity use in kW/h.

ScottBurson2• 14 years ago

Journalists routinely confuse energy and power units. Occasionally I write to one of them about it; maybe I'll write to this guy since his email address is readily available.

But yeah, if you look for it you'll see this in maybe 70 or 80% of news stories about power generation.

cbsmith12• 14 years ago

It's not uncommon for people in the energy business to say "gigawatts" as short hand for "gigawatt hours". In that context this sort of makes sense. At their peak (likely when the sun was just right and the clouds were parted over most of Germany), it produced 22 gigawatt hours in a one hour time period. Without the implied "gigawatt hour", saying it just hit "22 gigawatts" isn't really that impressive, because that could just be a momentary spike. Being able to sustain it, even for an hour, is impressive.

kragen2• 14 years ago

They didn't say "gigawatt hours". They said "gigawatts per hour", which would be a rate of change of power generation. For example, if the sun came up and in 6 minutes your solar power station went from producing 0 to producing 2.2 gigawatts, that would be an increase of 22 gigawatts per hour. I strongly suspect that the author of the article is just ignorant.

rievax_60• 14 years ago

I emailed Erik Kirschbaum about his "22 gigawatts of electricity per hour" statement. I received a "was deleted without being read" response.

masklinn• 14 years ago

20GW is nowhere near 20 plants at full capacity, it's 20 reactors, and is probably more of an average.

Reactors range from 400MWe to 1600MWe, and plants generally have 2 to 6 reactors with 2 outliers at respectively 7 (Kashiwazaki-Kariwa in Japan) and 8 (Bruce in Canada, although it's only running 6 reactors right now). The 10 biggest nuclear plants all have more than 4GW installed capacity.

FWIW, France has a total of 20 active plants grouping 57 reactors. The installed capacity is almost 62GWe.

gouranga• 14 years ago

Don't forget that the amount of power lost due to cooling systems, mining, fuel transport and refining of fissionable materials should be considered as it's a considerable chunk of that output.

rimantas• 14 years ago

1. It it most "considerable chunk" 2. We don't pick solar panels in the forest either.

Mystalic• 14 years ago

The same can be said for the cost of manufacturing and delivering solar panels.

antr• 14 years ago

the average capacity of a nuclear plant in Germany is 1.2GW, it's relatively close. I'm pretty certain that the plant in Essenbach with two units represents Germany's nuclear plant power range, i.e. unit 1 is c. 900MW and unit 2 1.4GW.

lispm4• 14 years ago

Here you can see the list of nuclear power plants in Germany:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deut...

The remaining plants have mostly only one reactor of around 1.4 GWe.

elric1v• 14 years ago

This is impressive, but I would guess that this was an especially sunny day. I'd like to see what the average output is.

blubbar4• 14 years ago

http://www.unendlich-viel-energie.de/uploads/media/AEE_Strom...

This is in German, but the only source i could find. It says PV produced 3% of the procuced energy in 2011. It is said the capacity grew about 30% since q4 2011, but the stats seem to be pending.

[BS]

In 2010 604,0 TWh where consumed [1], so that would be 604,0 TWh * 3% / 8760 h = 2 GW as a conservative estimate. But note the stats are all a bit out of date.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedarf_an_elektrischer_Energie...

[/BS]

As the graph says 612 TWh where produced, so 612 TWh * 0.03 / 8760h = 2 GW.

qrush• 14 years ago

Anyone else have a sudden urge to play Power Grid?

malkia2• 14 years ago

Weather is a factor here, for example this lasted for a very long period for us humans - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

But then technology advances so fast, so it might be the right stuff.

malkia2• 14 years ago

Why downvoted? I'm not against it, just noting that weather affects such technology much more than other.

lancewiggs• 14 years ago

The real insight for me is the success of the feed in tariff program. These reward suppliers at higher than market rates for feeding electricity back into the grid. E.g. You get paid retail prices, where you really should only get wholesale, which excludes transmission costs.

For personal generation a well designed feed in tarrif should provide incentive to build solar panels/wind turbines on your roof etc. A million households producing a little power each makes it a lot easier to get to sustainability.

greedo4• 14 years ago

Yes, the FIT is great if a) you're a solar equipment provider that can't compete with other energy technologies or b) if you're a energy provider that has hitched its wagon to solar energy, and can't compete with other technologies on a cost basis.

For consumers, it's not so great. Germany has some of the highest electricity prices before the FIT, and the FIT just makes it worse.

Kroem3r• 14 years ago

Kind of meh that the HN commentary is 'blah blah nuclear blah blah.' There are, IMHO, other aspects to this that are actually interesting: The effectiveness of subsidy in spurring a tech sector; the importance of cultural values; concrete rebuttal to the 'energy incident per solid angle crowd'; etc.

philip1209• 14 years ago

> 22 gigawatts of electricity per hour

I'm cringing.

bane• 14 years ago

I wonder if the nuclear plant will become the new unit of measure for popular discussions of energy production in a similar way that the Library of Congress is a unit of measure for data.

What's really impressive here is that Germany of all places is producing this much solar energy. One would better predict a sunnier climate as the place to do this. It's great work, but I can imagine that maintaining base-load is is still a difficult thing for the Germans. Anybody know how they are handling storage for distribution during winter months/nighttime/inclement weather conditions?

lifeisstillgood• 14 years ago

Front page of TED.com

http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_ren...

See 9:16. He arranges the power consumption of countries by per person per sq m. And renewables can sit on same scale, and his estimate for PV solar is about 20% of land mass of Germany needs to be covered.

This is one of the many problems of the renewables debate - apples and oranges. The Germans have done an incredible and positive thing. Massively upped the feed into the electric grid from solar PV. And electrical consumption is where nuclear plants feed - so the two methods are direct competitors.

But electrical consumption is only about 1/3 of goal energy budget of western countries, rest is evenly split between transport and heating and about 5% for everything else like rocket launches.

So 50% of about 30% says that "Germany has 15% of it's total energy from renewables, will need to increase that by 7fold, give everyone an electric car and heating that uses electricity and not ....

Yes it's a great step forward. But really, we are going to have to change our lifestyles beyond belief to meet even 80% energy use from renewables. Forget driving to supermarkets to pick up refrigerated milk and tomatoes flown in from Africa.

Watch the talk - his book is very good too.

cbsmith12• 14 years ago

Something doesn't add up though. From those calculations, it would seem that 3% of Germany's land mass is "covered". I strongly suspect that isn't the case.

kitsune_2• 14 years ago

Figures I heard on German television suggest 0,06% of Germany's area covered.

ph0rque• 14 years ago

Critics also complain growing levels of solar power make the national grid more less stable due to fluctuations in output.

DaniFong, I hope your company Light Sail Energy has some deals with Germany in the works for your energy storage product.

zaroth• 14 years ago

It's relatively easy to produce 22GWh for a couple hours each year. Try doing it 8,760 hours straight.

According to Reuters, solar provided 18TWh in 2011 (up 60% from 2010) which was 3% of total power output.

InclinedPlane2• 14 years ago

This is a deceptive headline. The solar plants produced that much power during a few hours. The article is light on details (and makes a few basic errors) but at a bare minimum we can know that the average amount of power over an entire day was far less for these solar plants than these peak power figures, probably about 1/5th as much. Whereas nuclear plants keep producing all day long.

This is great propaganda for the solar power industry but it does little to change the fact that solar power doesn't produce power when it's needed and storing energy is extremely expensive. This is not an indication that solar power is ready for prime time, to serve as base load power generation, it's just an indication that if you build enough PV panels you can get a lot of power for a few hours on a sunny day, which is something we've always known.

spoiledtechie• 14 years ago

You know what makes me happy? Germany's Solar Power. Germany's Political system. I personally believe this country is on the best path possible over all other countries even being an American my self. They are by far the most advanced politically than any other country I know, and that helps them advance it other areas of the country.

I applaud them!

SagelyGuru11• 14 years ago

I agree. It is very beneficial for the healthy outlook of any large and powerful country to badly lose a major war on its own territory. However, I don't really expect any Brits or Americans to even understand what I am talking about.

SagelyGuru11• 14 years ago

You need not even postulate any terrorist scenarios to realise that the nuclear plant risks are frighteningly real.

There are some 50 reactors in the US of the same vintage and design as Fukushima, including the spent fuel rods storage right next to the reactors.

Nuclear reactors produce very large amounts of heat concentrated in a small volume. Thus when the cooling system stops working, for whatever reasons, the core is going to melt down, guaranteed.

Despite the secrecy of TEPCO and their friends in government, many people now believe that the cooling failed the moment the earthquake struck. Mostly due to the poor state and maintenance of the cooling pipes. The backup diesel generators to run the cooling circuits (again the same as in the US), with known shaft/bearings problems, packed up within minutes. After that, there is nothing anyone can do, as we had seen. The tsunami probably provided just a creditable scapegoat excuse.

Germany sets new solar-power record

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