higher power bills are forcing business to relocate, who would have thought. To supplement the green energy in the days the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing they are building more "brown" coal plants so they will have adequate power and on the days the sun is shining and wind is blowing they have to sell the excess power at a loss I feel kind of sorry for the Germans but their loss is Americas gain as we continue to develop cheap power with our shale supplies until we can come up with a practical long term storage for energy
No need to feel sorry for anybody fool enough to damage their economy and power grid over AGW nonsense. If they're so lacking in discernment that they can't see thru the fraud of AGW, then they deserve to suffer the consequences. Of course there are always 'innocents' that get hurt - posterity, and those that saw thru the fraud and tried to stop it; but most Germans and Europeans are thoroughly indoctrinated into this nonsense, and believe all of it - same thing with ignorant Amerikan liberals. You and I don't deserve to suffer, our children don't deserve to suffer - but all of these leftist knobs that can't wait to enslave themselves deserve every bad thing that is coming their way.
This is no crumbling, this is an epic fail, which was predictable from scratch. It can be a reasonable point to build up the wind energy share, although it is more expensive than coal e.g., because you want to have a buffer if the prices for fossile energy are climbing, but they are going too fast here, nothing have been though through. The problem is mainly the electricity grid and the infrastructure, which has to be changed too abruptly fitting to the new energy sources. If they would have planned it reasonably (exchanging the older less effective power plants when a new one is necessary), the price increase would have been much more moderate. I agreee with Edward Teller, that green ideology is one of the most dangerous for human kind, for him as dangerous as the Nazi or Communist ideology.
The industry thing is a big problem that is fundamental to most all renewable generation. Most renewables cannot supply reactive power (VARs) to loads only active power. While residential consumers don't have to pay for their reactive power consumption large industrial does and large industrial's reactive load is very high. The cost to provide the amount of VAR support that renewables, shunt capacitors, is expensive. Industrials have to eat that cost in their power bills. A big advantage of a natural gas turbine is that one MVA of installed capacity can just as easily be one MVAR if a MVAR is what you need. Not so with most wind turbines. If you want a MVAR you have to pay for extra VAR compensation. That is also why the article mentions fear of blackouts. Its not just that you wont have the generation to match the load. Over or under generating MW isn't the only thing that can bring down a power system. So can voltage collapse which is caused by under generation of VARS. If you have synchronous generators you can easily up the excitation current and use their remaining spin to push out VARS. With most renewables if your installed VAR compensation cant keep up you are screwed as you haven no way to generate them.
Just to play devils advocate here but I would think that any commercial wind farm would be built with a integrated control system using a central automation controller to regulate both power factor and voltage at the point of utility interconnection.
Generally wind generators are asynchronous indication generators and provide no inherent voltage control. SVCs and tap changing transformers have to be used at the substation to regulate voltage and provide var support. The inability to provide var support directly from the units available spin is a great weakness of most renewables. So yes they do add var compensation at the sub but it comes at greater cost as you have to lean heavier on compensators than being able to generate the vars from spinning reserve as needed.
Solar panels do not really make so much sense in Germany, with it being cloudy so often. Also, because of the latitude, Germany is at about a 45 degree angle to the sun, that certainly does not help. If the wanted to reduce CO2 emissions, it would have been far more cost effective to just subsidize solar panels in Africa or Australia. Does not seem very smart of them.
Did you ever hear of a project called Desertec ? An ambitious solar installation which was going to be built in the Sahara for supplying power to Europe. However it fell apart for financial and political reasons.
German industry will not relocate to America. the Hussein Obama junta is suing BMW to hire criminals.
Physical reasons too. That is a long way to wheel power. Distance matters in transmission. A contributing factor to the Texas blackout was the distance the wind power had to travel from West to East Texas.
according to what I read they were only supposed to lose about 3% in a 1000 Km line. God only knows what voltage they would have to use to push that
yeah I posted a link in the nuke thread on current events, never dealt with anything greater than 480 and thousand foot runs, but I can grasp the concept
Well it can't respond in time to deal with events. People don't realize just how close and how often they to a blackout. Long distance DC does nothing to help respond to events.
