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German Grid Aching Under (Too Much) Solar Power
BERLIN - The German electricity grid faces instability because of too much solar power, an expert said.
A thin film solar array at Dimbach, Germany. Experts forecast between 8 gigawatts and 10 GW of solar power capacity to be installed this year -- the equivalent of roughly 10 large coal-fired power plants. In 2009, only 4 GW were installed. Thanks to a generous feed-in tariff, the installation of rooftop
solar panels and large-scale photovoltaic plants has exploded in
Germany.
Stephan Kohler, chairman of the DENA agency, an energy adviser to the government, has warned that the green boom could turn into a disaster for Germany's aging power grid.
"The network is facing a congestion due to solar power," Kohler told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. "That's why the expansion of solar power has to be cut back quickly and drastically."
Experts have long called for an overhaul of the European power grid to integrate the fluctuating renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.
Experts forecast between 8 gigawatts and 10 GW of solar power capacity to be installed this year -- the equivalent of roughly 10 large coal-fired power plants. In 2009, only 4 GW were installed.
Well aware that the industry is maturing more quickly than anticipated, Berlin this year agreed to reduce subsidies for rooftop panels by 16 percent.
The decision helped the German industry to a first-half sales boom, as private customers ordered panels in droves to beat feed-in-tariff reductions set for this summer.
Strong sales have continued until now, however, with experts forecasting a similarly strong 2011 when it comes to new installations. If the current trends continue, Germany would have a solar power capacity of nearly 50 GW by 2013.
"That would be a catastrophe for the grids," Kohler said, urging the German government to cap the installation of new solar panels at 1 GW per year. "Then we could reach the manageable benchmark of 30 GW in 2020," he said.
The German government through the Renewable Energy Law, or EEG, regulates the feed-in-tariff aimed at boosting power production from renewable energy sources. Paid by German taxpayers via their electricity bill and guaranteed for 20 years, the levies vary from 21 cents per kilowatt-hour for offshore wind turbines to 46 cents per kw/h for roof-mounted solar panels.
Berlin has vowed to gradually reduce subsidies but EEG-related costs will nevertheless rise significantly over the coming years, experts have warned.
The German consumer association VZBV claims that the solar panels installed in 2010 will result in additional costs of $36 billion during the next 20 years.
The German government has so far not voiced plans to limit solar power installations; an overhaul of the EEG isn't planned until 2012.
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98 Comments so far
Show All"'The network is facing a congestion due to solar power,' Kohler told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper. 'That's why the expansion of solar power has to be cut back quickly and drastically.'"
I'm not an engineer so I don't understand why it is, if the grid in truth has an overflow, that solar power must be cut back while leaving more polluting producers of energy in operation.
Wouldn't it be smarter to shut down a few coal-fired plants instead of trying to curtail the use of a cleaner source?
q
Like other posters here, I'm puzzled by the notion that there is "just too much solar", and it's overwhelming the grid. I'm thinking about normal fluctuations-- I know that during the night, the coal plants keep merrily burning coal because you can't shut them down or even moderate them much on a 12-hour basis. That's one reason that electric cars are touted-- you can use the excess electricity generated at night.
Anyway, if the grid handles such excesses at night, why can't it handle excesses during the day? I mean, I'm sure you would have to tweak or upgrade the grid some, but wouldn't it pay for itself? Maybe the innumerable contributions of small solar producers are too difficult to throttle?
Not that I'm an electrical engineer...
It would be good to read a more in-depth piece on this.
A simple and tried and true storage system for solar is hydrogen and oxygen through electrolysis. This past year an MIT professor created a catylis that makes this electrolysis more energy efficient.
Germany needs Smart Green Grids which are more efficient and geared to renewables.
New Mexico had plans for three Smart Green Grids ( with a little help from the Japanese).
But our lovely Dimo Senators gave us a new Drone Command Center at Cannon AFB instead.
Private money is building some part of a new Smart Green Grid but the Feds will not help.
Also while we are on the subject one may buy German Panels in the USA for $900 which produce 180watts and 550 BTU perhour of heated water.
Futhermore we are working on sequestering solar thermo in salts in caverns and mines to retrieve at night through steam driven turbines.
Hydrogen as a storage medium is woefully inefficient. In the Scientific American's "A Solar Grand Plan" compressed air is used as the energy storage medium to take up the "phase difference" between solar availability and energy demand. It is much cleaner than any battery technology, even if it is not quite as efficient.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-solar-grand-plan
How does the threat of this bomb you refer to hydrogen storage as in comparison to, say, nuclear?
Wait...we are talking about problems with H2 storage, aren't we? Those, I assume, have to do with explosions from leakage and ignition. What does Chernobyl have to do with any of this? As you stated, the explosions with H2 are chemical; nuclear has nothing to do with it.
Also I like to add that DENA represents the interest of it's investors which are primarily Banks. It's not a green the future were the interest in. There looking for the other green.
"Dena was established in the autumn of 2000 with its head office in Berlin. Shareholders in dena are the Federal Republic of Germany, KfW Bankengruppe, Allianz SE, Deutsche Bank AG and DZ BANK AG."
We live in a financial paradox which has three enemies: "efficiency", "sustainability", and "abundance"
If you implement one of those three, there can be no money made of it. It's simple financial economics! So I would say, with the dead of Hermann Scheer, the project will come to an quite end. Somehow I had already the suspicion that something like this would eventually submerge.
Thank you for explaining that in layman's terms.
To clarify what Justice Arcs said, it is very difficult and expensive to just shut down a coal fired plant and then it turn back on again within hours. The output of solar panels varies moment-to-moment as the weather changes, and throughout the day. Coal fired plants are very big and complicated and take a long time to start-up and shut down; they cannot just be turned on and off like a light bulb on a moment's notice, whenever the clouds disappear and then reappear.
"the green boom could turn into a disaster for Germany's aging power grid."
~ ♦ ~
i'm not an engineer either, but the above sentence caught my eye. you can't build anything without first laying a strong foundation.
Makes sense to me. But what surprises me is that other places, like Germany, have aging power grids that they have apparently ignored, just like we have in the USA. I thought we were top of the line at being inept on things like that.
We should have such problems.
Joe
Ain't nothing we 'mericans need to learn from them Europeans. USA! USA! USA!
(and to quote Home Simpson: "In case you hadn't noticed, I was being sarcastic.")
"no gods, no masters" --m. sanger
The argument that solar power is overwhelming the grid is absurd – exactly the opposite is true. Germany’s renewable power is supplied from thousands of small installations that are already distributed throughout the grid, which means less power will need to be transmitted through the grid to make up the difference in demand.
For example, If solar panels in a town were generating enough power to meet 100% of local demand, then there would be zero power moving through the high voltage grid connected to that town. If there were no solar power, then 100% of the town’s power would have to move through the grid from a remote generating station. The more distributed the power generation, the less strain on the grid, since the grid only needs to carry the difference between demand and locally generated power.
This is just the coal power industry trying to eliminate competition (and sanity) by turning facts upside down (i.e., saying renewable power will lead to grid congestion when in reality it reduces congestion).
............
" .... the green boom could turn into a disaster for Germany's aging power grid.
Experts have long called for an overhaul of the European power grid to integrate the fluctuating renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power."
Duh - if, indeed, the grid is being "overloaded", instead of cutting back on green power, wouldn't it make more sense to upgrade the grid?
This article is pure propaganda AGAINST solar. Indeed, if the problem is 'overloading' the old grid, replace the grid. The other obvious fact that people must consider--solar is still only a fraction (less than 20%) of the total electrical generation in Germany. Other sources of electricity--especially fossil fuels--could be cut instead.
Common Dreams should do more research and be more knowledgeable before publishing this professional misinformation, an attack upon solar.
Yes. The problem is the word, "overloaded."
The article is not pure fiction. There is a real technical problem, but it isn't "overloading." It's that the power company needs to be able to control what's on the grid.
The solution would be some kind of communication network, and a protocol that would give the utility direct control over all of the many thousands of privately owned solar systems that are tied to the grid so that they may match supply with demand.
Of course, there would be a conflict of interest. It would be in the utility company's interest to shut off all of power generation that it does not own or profit from, and to supply the demand from power stations that they do own. Some kind of regulations would have to be put in place to discourage them from doing that. Probably it would be an extension of the same law that was written to allow subscribers to connect their solar systems to the grid in the first place.
I disagree.
Common Dreams should not be critized for re-publishing this UPI article. This small non-profit should not be expected to be more knowledgeable than its most knowledgeable readers about every subject that happens to be newsworthy.
Besides, re-publishing articles from the mainstream media may be helpful for those of us that don't pay much attention to the mainstream media. What's more this article has generated some interesting and informative discussion.
But probably a lot of people never read the comments, only the articles. If the purpose was propaganda, then CD did its readers a disservice by contributing to the idea that solar on a large scale is problematic. And it seems that either the intent WAS propaganda, or it was very poorly written. And yes, one can't expect CD to have engineers on staff, but perhaps now they could have someone look into this, and if the conclusion is that they were duped, they could publish a retraction?
I don't believe anyone has yet mentioned that the reason cloudy Germany has such a large amount of distributed solar is its FITS system, Feed-In Tariff, in which the family that installs panels on their roofs or puts a methane digester in the pigs' barn is guaranteedf a nice return on the investment--is paid a price for that power well above current market value (i.e. the price paid for heavily-subsidized fossil-fuel or nuclear power). No doubt this is unpopular with power companies and banks.
Stiv,
Exactly. Automatic load balancing technology is at least 70 years old. With the introduction of transistors and then microprocessors it became child's play. No human can keep up with it. It must be done automatically because electrical load is a split second by split second issue. The real problem with electrical load is NEVER surges (as long as a computer does the load balancing). There are numerous shunt devices to 'trash' the surge. No, problems always occur when there isn't enough power available to service the load.
Oil corporations love articles like this. Their greatest nightmare is a decentralized grid where their only revenue comes from being a backup to the main solar grid and the servicing of load balancing equipment. The only merit in this article would ostensibly be the unwarranted subsidy the German government is giving the people. But when any break the people get is compared with the massive subsidies that energy companies get, then even that rationale falls on its' face. The oil pigs not only unduly profit from selling us the energy; they stick us with the 'external costs' from trashing the environment as well.
I knew an electrical engineer in a power station during a period where the power company wanted an increase in rates. There had been many blackouts. Over a few drinks, he said that it was all baloney. All they had to do to generate an 'accidental' blackout was to disable (for maintenance of course) all the automatic load balancing equipment. No human can keep up with the surges so WALA!, lots of blown transformers and a cascading blackout. Next thing you know, the government caves to a rate hike. And you thought wall street was the only place dirty tricks are played?
This artcle is step one in pulling out the incentives for people to put in solar power while preserving the unjustified massive monetary subsidy that power companies have at our expense.
Justice Arcs says it well:
It is the article that is massively out of the rational universe, after some analysis, likely propaganda meant for Americans.
I live in the greater Seattle area and out here we depend upon hydroelectric power. I once went on a tour of our major electrical production system and had explained to me that Seattle follows a predictable daily pattern of electric use. It increases at 4pm and regularly increases until a fall at about 7pm. (just one detail) In order to meet the needs of increases such as this "late afternoon-early evening demand" they require starting up the water physically moving through a turbine in one of the dams in order to get the speed up to full before they can put the turbine-generators "on line." This time differs for each of the dams and largely depends upon the technology that was installed in the historical period it was originated or or overhauled.
If Seattle had a large number of "roof-top solar panels" the demand could change in seconds with our frequent changing of weather. It can cloud up or clear off literally in minutes. Our system of hydroelectric generation could not react fast enough to keep the electrical supply at a constant voltage and rate of power production. I suspect that almost any power supply method has similar timing problems. It is these timing technology problems that make it very difficult to integrate local roof top power supplies and large wind power farms with an existing grid. The grid has to be built so as to have safety mechanisms (like we have circuit breakers in our houses) to rapidly shut down a system that is stressed by unbalanced loads.
By strangest coincidence, as I write these words, the radio just announced the failure of a power grid on our Olympic Penninsula, and made the subsequent announcement that it will take most of the night to bring all communities back onto the power system.
I have recently returned from Germany. That nation is light years ahead of us in Solar Power.
They need to charge batteries when the sun shines.
This is a great opportunity to sell the Germans a lot of batteries so their energy can be stored at home. Another approach would be to organize their social and economic activities to correspond to the sunshine. I can see it now. Along with the weather forecast, is the admonition to turn on all of your electrical appliances. That might be hard for Germans to waste energy on purpose. That would mean that we could send over some of our experts on how to waste energy, and they wouldn't all have to be military people.
oops
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The exposition by Justice Arcs is articulate, fair and accurate. I would be astounded if the infrastructure of any country could absorb such a quantity and timing imbalance due to a change in energy production sources. Having recently joined a community supported agriculture cooperative, I can provide a simplistic analogy that illustrates the problem.
For the last 70 years our society has established a network of supermarkets that trained us to purchase food goods in quantities that we could consume before they spoiled. We are even able to consume vegetables that are out of season, either through purchase agreements with countries that are capable of producing these vegetables or by purchasing frozen and canned goods that were grown at other times of the year. The supermarkets themselves act as functionally unlimited food storage facilities.
On any given week, CSAs can deliver quantities of a single species of vegetable that far exceeds the needs (or indeed the culinary desires) of a member family. When a family receives all these beets (for example) they are likely unprepared and lack the mechanisms to deal with them. They have neither the materials nor expertise required to can goods and often do not have freezer space sufficient to store a year's worth of every type of vegetable they consume on an annual basis. A different (distributed) infrastructure is required to allow efficient utilization of these resources.
The same applies to western energy grids. Distributed solar resources can not be directly substituted with centralized, regulated power sources such as coal burning power plants. Energy utility consumers are conditioned to expect an unmitigated supply of power at any time of day. Without appropriate storage mechanisms, these consumption expectations are incompatible with distributed solar production facilities.
Electricity production plants cycle their diurnal production according to measured and expected demand loads. They designed and built their facilities around these consumption patterns. A sudden shift of either greater or lesser demand or production would be difficult to adapt to, even when it seems illogical. Let me give one last anecdote.
To avoid getting sued let me protect the name of the company that I will use as an example and give it the totally unrelated and silly name of Number1. Number1 buys its power by contract from the grid in order to feed its giant server facilities. They guarantee to the power company that they will consume a certain amount of electricity per hour and in exchange, the power company provides them with a lower cost per kWh. When Number1 occasionally shuts down its facilities for maintenance they would be out of compliance with their contract and would underload the electricity production facility. So, Number1 brings out hundreds of electric heaters, opens the doors and window and turns them all on to match the load that would have been there with their computers on. It may seem (and is) a horrifying waste, but it is an example of the current infrastructure being unable to handle a momentary collapse of demand.
Either demand will have to adapt to deal with electricity supply dominated by solar cycles (and beets only in season) or distributed storage infrastructure will need to be developed. The balancing act done by the western power grid is not inconsequential and unfortunately, I think we have a lot of retooling to do to make solar panels on everyone's house a replacement for the decadence and ease of burning fossil fuels.
"an underground reservoir"
A neighborhood scale system of this nature (sans pv) is in operation ... DLSC.ca
I don't see why, when solar production supplies excess energy, you could not simply heat a highly insulated tank of water and use the stored heat in winter. There are plenty of ways to deal with excess energy but the best is to charge energy storage devices--heck, pump water uphill into a reservoir and then tap the energy through hydro as it gushes out. That would tend to even out the diurnal cycle, wouldn't it? Maybe these projects would cost some money, but that does not mean they shouldn't be undertaken. Solar might involve some costs we hadn't considered.
Drosera,
You're correct on every technical point. You can indeed pump water uphill for storage or heat thermal reservoirs or spin flywheels or charge capacitors or use any of a host of energy storage techniques. And you're particularly correct when you say that these projects will cost money. Furthermore you'll certainly not hear me argue against laying out the capital to develop these resources.
The only reason I submitted my long-winded essay was because people were claiming that this article is mere propaganda for oil and gas companies. Whereas there exists a colossal quantity of true propaganda from energy companies, I feel this article doesn't qualify. Its undeniably true that there are multiple techniques by which we can store renewable energy. My only point is that we don't currently have them on a scale that allows substitution of energy production sources and I'm left unsurprised that the German energy grid is adapting poorly.
Agreed. One of upfront costs of solar should involve energy storage. Of course, coal has a problem sometimes, too. You can't just put out the fires that make the steam when demand recedes. Burning coal just allows stored energy in the coal to be released into the air for no purpose. Funny that we insist that energy tapped from the sun has to do useful work. Am I missing something here?
The accidental theory of gov't and politician incompetence is so overused and ridiculous in these days, while corporations take over more and more of every aspect of gov't planning and operations.
HEAR, HEAR, HEAR! I read so many articles that assume that corporate journalists are all lazy or stupid, or politicians are clueless, that if we all "send a message" to the Democratic Party they'll suddenly wake up and start representing the people again, etc--when the little man is perfectly visible behind the curtain. No, it's not stupidity or laziness, suddenly gone universal in these professions--it's that we have a system in which corporate media and the government represent the big corporations and the extremely wealthy, and we would have to change that SYSTEM, not individual politicians or journalists or broadcast companies, to change any of that.
>>The balancing act done by the western power grid is not inconsequential and unfortunately, I think we have a lot of retooling to do to make solar panels on everyone's house a replacement for the decadence and ease of burning fossil fuels.
I respectfully disagree. Nothing a bank of common batteries and a series of common timers could not solve. Let's not make rocket science out of this whole thing and continue down the path of destruction. I am reminded of the old right wing chestnut about the Soviet zero gravity space pen. They called it a pencil.
Interesting propaganda piece.
Recently, Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition rescinded Germany’s phase-out of nuclear power, despite polls showing 2/3 of the Germany people supporting the phase-out.
Merkel's CDU party argued that Germany couldn’t yet afford to make the switch away from nuclear power, which comprises nearly a quarter of the country’s energy consumption.
While the rival SPD asserted that investments in renewable solar and wind power could make up the difference, Merkel said that Germany shouldn’t risk falling behind the economies of France and Britain, both of which have renewed commitments to nuclear energy. She has also argued that nuclear energy produces fewer climate-damaging emissions than coal, Germany’s main fuel alternative.
Rather than subsidizing the nuclear industry further, I wonder whether those funds couldn't have been spent improving the grid deficiencies the article cites...
Nuclear energy is as unstable an electric power source as anyone can create. The U.S. has had widespread blackouts exacerbated because certain nuclear power plants were the first sources to trip offline, to save themselves. Once a nuke trips off, it stays off for days because it has to power itself down.
Pumped hydroelectric storage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Flywheels
http://www.solarthermalmagazine.com/2010/09/30/storing-renewable-in-advanced-flywheel-based-energy-storage-systems-stabilizing-the-grid/
Compressed Air
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/compressed-air-startup-to-inflate-utility-power-generation/
Ultracapacitors
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/22062/?a=f
There are these and many more solutions not involving pollution. Before we can implement them, populations must become informed, speak truth to the power authorities, and demand change. Fossil fuels are not easy or cheap energy, and the environmental costs so long hidden and ignored are becoming more obvious and critical to us all.
There is abundant clean energy pulsing all around us. We have proven technology to harvest, convert and store it cleanly, and we can implement that technology scalably and profitably now- if we will only learn to recognize and reject the greedy, deceitful propaganda of the coal, oil, and gas cartels.
Add to this list the melted salt power towers out west. They save vast amounts of solar heat for evening electric generation, which Western states need and lack. Nighttime and 24 hour electric generation are also possible by storing heat.
I think that I can invent two other ways of efficiently storing power. One method uses stored low temperature solar heat, more easily stored, to crank out electricity. The other is a relative of pumped hydro except it's more energy-efficient, more land-efficient and more water-efficient (less evaporation). Pumped hydro has maybe a 30% power loss between input and output.
Thanks for the research,
Looks like the one atom thick carbon layers is gonna be a big revolution in all things electrical.
Interesting that this article comes out only days after Hermann Scheer dies. The insider advocate is gone and the wolves smell blood.
Now I am not so sure that this is a propaganda piece. It seems that a redo of the energy grid, along with smart meters, is in order. But it will take time, and there are social costs-- new transmission lines, installing hydrostorage in beautiful areas among them.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,694287,00.html
Yes, as I go back and read it again, I agree that the original article is framed in a way that seems an attempt to bias the reader against solar.
It seems clear from the Der Spiegel article that a new energy grid, and new metering and storage strategies are needed. It will be costly. If we were smart we would get going on these things now... To this reader, the end result will be well worth it-- but any upgrades to the system will provide an excuse for the electrical companies, no matter who they are, to do a little price-gouging and increase profits. And it will tear up a certain amount of landscape. That doesn't make me particularly happy, and I think locals where that happens will be unhappy as well.
best dang news I've heard today........to bad the USA, couldn't lead itself into something practical like this.
whocares;)
One difference is the predominance of solar power farms in Germany, where the US has mostly rooftop solar power (what we have of it). Our rooftop solar makes our electric grid more stable using existing electric line capacity, because the solar electric power is generated exactly where the summer peak load air conditioning is running, in the residential neighborhoods.
The German solar farm biz is full of medium-sized businesses now, where we are largely homeowners. They don't generate the electricity where they use it. Germany doesn't want to mention that they are somewhat pro-biz to a fault, which apparently can conflict with good planning of an electric grid.
Thanks for all the informative and interesting information you (herpolhode, hypewaders and others too) have put forward in this thread. I've learned a lot about non-polluting forms of energy storage and look forward to seeing what solutions are implemented in Germany, whose people are spearheading the great endeavor of moving away from petroleum coal and nuclear power.
Not being familiar with the wide variety of methods researched, has there been much interest in gravity-based solutions that aren't reliant on water/hydraulic systems? While reading, I immediately starting seeing large cylindrical shafts, with huge piston-weights that would be raised by gears in the walls of the shaft, then lowered by gravity when the stored energy is required. Semi-permanent (as in few repairs over hundreds of years of use) simple, non-polluting... efficient? Already well researched and refuted? I have seen this suggestion raised in a few places, but the hydraulic solutions seem to generally win out.
Cheers and Namaste to you
–SS
Namaste, you keep mentioning flywheels and you never mention compressed air. Compressed air is very cheap by comparison, and there have been some good engine designs based on it. Disused underground mines make good storage vessels for compressed air. It has not become reality for reasons OTHER than technical ones, but vehicles powered on compressed air are also very practical.
Thanks for the insight PaulK. Distribution of power sources is indeed a consideration.
Joe
I have recently driven through much of Baden-Wuertemberg between the Danube and Switzerland. I saw a few mini-solar-power-plants but they were always close to a gas station. Their power output was used to operate the stations. Other than those I saw only rooftop units many on the roofs of farm-barns. At least in that region of Germany there appears to be a sensible distribution of solar panels.
My cousin who lives in Bad Saulgau south of Ulm told me that the more recent generations of panels have heaters which melt snow, hence can be useful even in winter. The Germans appear to be light years ahead of us in this technology. It therefore seems silly to me to criticize Germany for its solar power farms.
Can the soalr power be mounted on individual car or bus or train run on solar power during a sunnyday?
can a large capacitor hold and store electric charge for later discharge for local small operations?
Does it have a role in electricty supply to school or college or even churche in poor countries?
( all these could be stupid questions but has economic relevance for a lot of poor countries)
Austraila has a transcontinental solar car race every year.
I do volunteer work when I am in India at a School-orphanage which has large solar powered yard lights. All day they soak up power and at night they provide valuable security from potential prowlers. (Child theft and trafficking is a problem in the area.)
They are self contained, and in this application, with abundant and reliable sunshine most days of the year work like a charm. They are sort of expensive, a thousand dollars apiece, but because they don't have moving parts are very sturdy and doners feel good about contributing to something of lasting value.
Next time I go I'm going to experiment with a solar cooker for my own food. It breaks my heart to see how poor people are forced to denude their environment of every bit of burnable biomass including potential soil fertilizer simply to cook food.
Without the same kind of strong sunlight in my home country solar becomes more difficult but that's not a reason to make a start and hopefully Germany's problems and the way they go about solving them will be valuable to the late adopters.