Denmark Faces a Tricky Transition To 100 Percent Renewable Energy 488
HughPickens.com writes Justin Gillis writes in the NYT that Denmark is pursuing the world's most ambitious policy against climate change, aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well. The trouble is that while renewable power sources like wind and solar cost nothing to run, once installed, as more of these types of power sources push their way onto the electric grid, they cause power prices to crash at what used to be the most profitable times of day. Conventional power plants, operating on gas or coal or uranium, are becoming uneconomical to run. Yet those plants are needed to supply backup power for times when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. With their prime assets throwing off less cash, electricity suppliers in Germany and Denmark have applied to shut down a slew of newly unprofitable power plants, but nervous governments are resisting, afraid of being caught short on some cold winter's night with little wind. "We are really worried about this situation," says Anders Stouge, the deputy director general of the Danish Energy Association. "If we don't do something, we will in the future face higher and higher risks of blackouts."
Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply.
Environmental groups, for their part, have tended to sneer at the problems the utilities are having, contending that it is their own fault for not getting on the renewables bandwagon years ago. But according to Gillis, the political risks of the situation also ought to be obvious to the greens. The minute any European country — or an ambitious American state, like California — has a blackout attributable to the push for renewables, public support for the transition could weaken drastically. Rasmus Helveg Petersen, the Danish climate minister, says he is tempted by a market approach: real-time pricing of electricity for anyone using it — if the wind is blowing vigorously or the sun is shining brightly, prices would fall off a cliff, but in times of shortage they would rise just as sharply.
Use the money you save (Score:5, Insightful)
Use the money you save to buy electricity on the open market when you need it. Just pray that you don't have any jerk-off "power traders" holding energy back from you until the price goes up. Remember what happened to California?
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Who is going to build a conventional power plant and get it online within a few minutes of the moment when power will be almost priceless? "Almost priceless" because there simply is no other power available because every region nearby is in the same boat of having 100% renewable, most of which vary dramatically based on weather which has been unusually unfavorable for weeks. (The answer is: No One - It's Not Possible).
Presumably, hospitals et al won't be allowed to have their own generators powered by fossi
Re:Use the money you save (Score:4, Insightful)
Denmark is connected to the rest of Europe. Wide geographic distribution should mean that few conventional plants are required once renewable capacity is high enough.
Hospitals and other vital services will of course be allowed to use fossil fuels. Let's not be silly about this, there will always be exceptions for safety reasons, it's just that the vast majority of the energy will be renewable and there will be no big fossil fuel plants any more.
Re:Use the money you save (Score:5, Insightful)
You know bio diesel exists? Just use that as a fallback with ye olde diesel generator. I see totally no reason why infrastructure should collapse in a blackout without fossil fuels. Now there are good and valid concerns why you don't want to use wide scale bio diesel use, for example in cars, but that does not mean you can't use it as an energy buffer for critical infrastructure. Batteries are almost never a good idea, they are expensive and quite nefarious for the environment when at their end of life. You only really want/need batteries as a buffer until the generator kicked in.
Use the money you save (Score:3, Interesting)
Jerk-off "power traders"? You're probably accustomed to the nice consequences of electricity being regulated as a utility however if you do what you propose which is buy/sell electricity as a commodity in an open market those are the exact 100% natural behaviors that occur as a consequence. You can't advocate for a fundamentally unappetizing idea like eating 100% of your food from restaurant dumpsters and then follow up by saying "except for all of the rotten food and unsanitary conditions".
I mean you CAN,
Re: Are renewable energy generators up to task ? (Score:3, Informative)
Solar panels still generate electricity under cloudy conditions. In fact, it actually increases the diffuse radiation. Sure direct normal radiation decreases, but the cloud cover allows for reflection of radiation back down from the sky that is not insignificant. I live in an area that is regularly overcast and PV performs quite well in this area. In this situation I would be more concerned about obstructions (shading).
Re:Are renewable energy generators up to task ? (Score:5, Funny)
in places like Denmark, the average hour of sunshine in cloudless sky per day is, -- let me be generous and put it as, -- 5 hours a day
I understand we're all geeks here. However, I think we can be expected to have a basic academic knowledge of environmental facts. For example, even though from my basement I may see very little of The Big Fireball in the Sky, I still know, based on YouTube videos, that clouds don't entomb us in pitch darkness.
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There is a tool at http://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg... [europa.eu] for estimating the lost efficiency of solar panels due to clouds etc. For Denmark it gives about 27%. From wikipedia efficiency of commercial cells is typically 21.5%, so about 200 W/m^2. So after losses lets say 140 W/m^2 times half the time (the sun is up on average) so 70 W/m^2 average over the year. There are about 7000 hours in the year, so we get about 500 KWh/m^2/yr.
The total energy consumption of Denmark (wikipedia, and probably not including vehi
Re:Are renewable energy generators up to task ? (Score:5, Interesting)
The think you both miss is that on January the sun is much lower on the horizon causing solar panels to produce much less electricity. From these real like German [fraunhofer.de] numbers solar panels produced 0.8TWh in January and 4.9TWh in June. The production capacity in January was only 16% of June.
Replacing all roofs is not that great as north facing roofs would only get indirect sunlight and east/west facing roofs would only be viable half the day. Then there are the roofs that are in the shade of other buildings or trees. Just because light is hitting a solar panel does not mean that it producing anywhere near capacity.
Also, do you have any idea the cost of that many PVs?
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Lets use some German numbers [fraunhofer.de]. They have an installed solar capacity of 38.124 GW. In January 2014 they produced about 800GWh of electricity. With even 5 hours of sunlight they should have produced 5.8TWh. That means that the actual production is only 14% of installed capacity. The average household electricity usage in Germany [shrinkthatfootprint.com] is 3,612KWh/r. With a 20% premium for heating in winter we come up with 12 KWh/day. So you would need 12,000/10 watts/square foot / 5 hours / 12% efficiency = 50,000 square feet of pa
Re:Are renewable energy generators up to task ? (Score:5, Funny)
Lets use some German numbers
Nein!
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Is the summary wrong then, or incomplete?
aiming to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050
Gas heating is burning fossil fuels in any form.
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This is Denmark, yes? You know, the country that is surrounded by oceans that have some of the strongest tides? I think Denmark could produce almost all of it's power though tidal power plants. The only real trick is how to buffer the power during the lull of high and low tide.
You are mostly correct solar (fotovoltaic) is a dumb idea, but there are more renewable power sources than solar and wind.
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This is Denmark, yes? You know, the country that is surrounded by oceans that have some of the strongest tides? I think Denmark could produce almost all of it's power though tidal power plants. The only real trick is how to buffer the power during the lull of high and low tide.
You are mostly correct solar (fotovoltaic) is a dumb idea, but there are more renewable power sources than solar and wind.
There is no tide to speak of in Denmark. I'm not sure that we'd classify the sea between the islands (Denmark is basically an island nation) as "oceans". The tides are usually 1m or less, most pronounced in the eastern part facing the North Sea, much less pronounced in the western parts that sits in the Baltic Sea.
But the flat topology and the fact that most of Denmark is islands, there's a *lot* of coastline, and wind is a much preferred as renewable energy source here. I don't think people realize how muc
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As far as I remember the North Sea has some of the highest tidal sway. Granted looking at this table [wikipedia.org] Denmark comes at to low end, but 1-2m tidal sway is not a little bit of water moving, especially if the topology is rather flat.
Re:Are renewable energy generators up to task ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem with solar isn't clouds, its the winter. In high summer solar PV is producing 8-9 hours worth of its peak capacity, but in the winter it comes down to less than 2 (to be generous). Oh, so wind blows stronger in the winter, but there is a bell curve of possibilities and there will be "perfect storm of lack of wind events" every whatever years, when the wind will be weak over very large areas, for a day, when solar is producing close to nothing.
The main concern is very serious, a country with a large mix of solar and wind still needs a large dispatchable power generation capacity to make up for the supply-demand gaps, but if those peaking power sources are only needed for a few days per year, its not economical to keep them open !
That's why I think the right mix is solar-wind-nuclear-geothermal-biomass-hydro. Specially baseload geothermal/nuclear and peaking biomass, it brings some sanity to this model of intermittent solar+wind power sources, unless your country have lots of hydro, with lots of hydro a solar-wind-hydro mix might be achievable with total stability.
That's the problem of having the environmentalists dictate the energy policy without much respect for the people that really keep the lights on, the transmission and generation electrical engineers. They aren't happy at all with this insanity, cause they know in the end they will be blamed if the lights go out.
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Danish energy use in total (NOT just electricity, but everything) was 763PJ (212TWh) in 2013. You can expect about 900kWh yearly per 1kW of typical solar panel installed in Denmark. Therefore it takes an installed capacity of 240GW of solar panels to cover Denmark. You need about 8m2 for 1kW of panel (technology dependent), so that comes to around 2000 km2. In comparison, Denmark is currently farming around 26500 km2.
In other words, even for a really lousy location for solar panels like Denmark, area use i
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And quite often you have too much which causes wind generators to shut down.
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You would need to pair a normal wind turbine with a high wind turbine to maintain power which means turbine power would cost twice as much.
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Energy in wind goes up by the cube of the wind speed. High wind turbines would be dirt cheap because the wings would be so short. Not that anyone makes them just to cover the few hours of nation-covering storm conditions per year.
In most storms there will be one wind farm just on the edge of the storm, and that wind farm will be producing at close to 100%, i.e. at least twice its average production (three times if it is a wind farm on land). That covers for a lot of lost capacity.
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It is too cheap at times. When everything is going well there is a lot of wind energy available. The problem is that when winds ate too high or too low it is very difficult to compensate for. The conventinal plants needed to back up renewable are not viable because they are used only when needed yet still have all the fixed maintenance costs. We don't have an electricity generation problem we have an electricity storage and distribution problem.
Home storage (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. If a car can get a 50+kwh battery in it, why can't every house have it too? That storage capacity is enough for a few days of intensive use.
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We are talking about winter months where solar will only generate about 10-15% of what it does in summer. That means three months where there may not be enough electricity produced.
Houses are not the only user of electricity. There are business, industry, streetlights, etc. It would take billions of dollars worth of batteries to store a few days worth of power.
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Re:Home storage (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at real figures from Germany [fraunhofer.de]. They have an installed solar capacity of 38.124 GW. In January 2014 they produced about 800GWh of electricity. With even 5 hours of sunlight they should have produced 5.8TWh. That means that the actual production is only 14% of installed capacity. Daylight does not mean full output.
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Been to Wales? You'd be lucky to get 10% in the summer!
But seriously, based on a quick stab at the numbers from the met office [metoffice.gov.uk] you get 1700 hours a year in the sunniest parts of Wales and 1200 in the least sunny. That's between 13% and 20% across the whole year. So less than 15% in the Winter seems pretty likely.
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Re:Home storage (Score:4, Insightful)
Fortunately in the winter other sources ramp up, such as wind and thermal gradient. Having batteries at home still makes a lot of sense because you can charge them up at night when demand is low and electricity is cheap. It's a nice way of getting a lot of storage into the grid in a way that benefits consumers rather than big energy companies.
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Having batteries at home still makes a lot of sense because you can charge them up at night when demand is low and electricity is cheap
Except that with a high solar power capacity in the network, it tends to be inverted. At night little capacity is available and the price tends to go up and at daytime with high capacity the price tends to go down. The good news is that basic demand follows the same curve as solar capacity over a day. The tricky times are during dusk, dawn and early evening, where you still have relative high demand but little capacity. Then again, I don't think solar power (fotovolatic) is a good idea.
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In places with proper winter, average wind speeds tend to be higher in winter. Storms are not large enough to be a problem once we get the European grid strengthened a bit more.
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Expensive? Maybe. Too expensive? Well, wait until Russia cuts off gas. Then you'll see the full cost of fossil fuels.
Energy independence is worth a lot of money.
Also batteries die (Score:2)
Remember we don't have battery technology that lasts forever, or really even for a long time. So you have to lifecycle those batteries, they will have to be replaced periodically. Probably once ever 5-10 years max. Well add in the cost of that now to the total cost. Also add in the energy required to create and dispose of said batteries to your calculation.
Ends up not being a great option with current battery technology.
Re:Home storage (Score:5, Informative)
Cost is one factor, a 50kWh battery is about over 25,000 USD -- about $500 per kWh for lithium ion car batteries. Projected cost by 2025 is about $160 per kWh, so only $8,000 in in 2025
It does not last a few days of intensive use either. Avg US household use is in 2012 was 10,837 kWh per year, or about 29.7 hWh per day, so 50kWh is less than 2 days..
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That is 0.50 $/Wh. You can buy USB powerbanks for EUR 7 per 2600 mAh, which is about 0.70 EUR/Wh or 0.85 $/Wh and includes a USB cable, fancy colored shell, USB connectors, charging circuits, and status LEDs.
I'm surprised that the economy of scale makes so little difference.
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A brand new Nissan Leaf 24kWh battery is about $4500, so about $190/kWh. That's brand new, and for this type of storage you can use recycled or recovered cells that are much cheaper. That is assuming you want lithium; low temperature sodium sulphur cells might be a better bet.
Re:Home storage (Score:4, Informative)
I believe Nissan has stated that those are sold at a loss. They are only available for leaf owners as a service basically to avoid scaring away new buyers and give value to secondary sales.
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Source? It seems like a reasonable near-cost price for a pack that size, given the cost of the individual cells they use in quantity.
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Avg US household use is in 2012 was 10,837 kWh per year, or about 29.7 hWh per day, so 50kWh is less than 2 days..
This is a story about Denmark, not the US. America has one of the highest per capita electricity uses in the world*. According to the wiki [wikipedia.org], Americans use almost three times more electicity than Danes, probably due to air conditioning and low energy prices (US is listed [wikipedia.org] as .08-.17 $/kWh, Denmark 40.38)
Anecdotal evidence: I just checked my electricity consumption, which is around 4,000kWh for the past year, including a large TV and more computers than any sane 2 person household would need. According to an e
Ok but that's electricity, not energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Guess what? Cold places use MORE energy than warm ones. While people like to hate on ACs as some excess, they are actually quite efficient. Since they move heat, they can move more energy than they use. A good AC can easily move 3-5 watts of heat for each watt of energy it requires to operate. No such luck with heating systems, they at best get you 1 watt of heat for each watt they take.
Then there's the issue of temperature delta. If we take 25 degrees (C) as a target room temperature, well then you can see
Re:Ok but that's electricity, not energy (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't take 25 degrees C as the target room temperature.
I would rather use room temperature as the target room temperature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... [wikipedia.org]
You probably come from somewhere warm if you take 25 C as a target. Someone from somewhere cold might be perfectly comfortable going less than room temperature (and also wearing a sweater -- you can bundle yourself up to a greater than you can strip down).
You should also note that indoors is already warmer than the outdoors due both to waste heat from electric equipment and the humans inside, combined with the insulation (which tends to be much higher in cold places).
The other consideration here is it's simply easier to heat with alternative energy sources. Such as wood. Right now my heating and A/C are on the fritz due to some water damage and I'm using a wood fireplace.
The counter here would be that sources like solar are also more fruitful on warm days.
This said, I am aware of the recent findings that, at least in the US, heating tends to be more energy expensive than cooling. That's even easier to believe if you're all cranking it to 25.
Re:Ok but that's electricity, not energy (Score:5, Insightful)
Heating and cooling is not symmetrical.
For one, it gets coldest during the night, when most people are in bed and blankets are a good tool to stay warm. It gets hottest in the middle of the day when most people are up and about (in countries without a siesta culture).
Also, isolating a house to keep in heat is much easier than isolating it to keep heat out, especially if you want to keep windows etc.
Third, warm clothing allows you to operate comfortably even if it is cold, a warm sweater means a room of around 18 celcius / 65 fahrenheit is comfortable. Stripping down is more difficult, but especially less acceptable in a business environment. Current business fashion originates in Northeastern Europe during the 'little ice age' of the 18th century, wearing a three piece suit with shirt, undershirt and tie is much more suited for 18/65 than for 25/77 degrees.
I live in Amsterdam and have the thermostat set to 19/66 degrees when I am at home, it cools down to something like 16 degrees during the night. I don't have A/C but in the summer the temperature easily goes up to 25/77 degrees in house, which is fine with light clothing. On hot summer days it can go up to 30/86 degrees, which is too hot to be comfortable for me, but that is quite rare.
Finally, Denmark might 'see' 15-30 degrees below zero once every century, but average low (night) temperature in January is more like -2. So, a delta of also around 15-20 degrees from room temperature.
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It's technical name is ground source heat pump or geothermal heat pump, often just shortened to geothermal. It's loops are typically 6-8 below ground (for horizontal loops) where the ground temperature is relatively constant year round. Yes it is different that "geothermal power" or "geothermal heating" which uses heat from the earth directly, but it's still "geothermal" none the less.
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Because nobody is making that many batteries yet and they're quite expensive? The whole Tesla "gigafactory" is so they can produce 500,000 cars per year. That's a drop in the bucket for supplying homes with batteries.
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Because lithium is a limited resource and current prices are based off the fact that it isn't in overwhelmingly huge demand to be installed in every single apartment building in huge volumes.
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Do you comprehend the sheer volume of space this will require in every single apartment building? Not to mention the obvious problems like fire risk that would require redesign of much of the building, threat of acid leak and potential lead poisoning.
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I'm interested in the solution you propose that would fit your average Danish apartment block.
Lithuim's advantage is not only light weight but its general efficiency per volume and lack of toxicity typically associated with lead-acid.
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This is nothing compared to the price of the house. Let the company that builds the house install them, like they install isolating windows (which are more expensive than that, btw). Or rent it from your electricity provider. Yeah it's expensive for an egoistic individual, but it is not for the entire society.
Cost nothing to run? (Score:3)
bollocks... they require servicing and checking they're still putting out the correct frequency etc.
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I think by costing nothing to run he mean costing nothing to run excepted for the maintenance compared to coal/gas/fuel/uranium plants who need the fuel and maintenance to run.
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Sure, a Gigawatt power plant, whether coal or nuclear, takes loads of maintenance. Thing is, they also produce so much more power that merely sending somebody by once a year to glance that the greed led is still softly glowing is more maintenance per watt.
Sure, they're hooking them up to computerized monitoring now, but that increases install costs and you still have to send somebody out to fix stuff when it does go wrong. It rarely does, but I remember reading somewhere that something like 10% of home in
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"[Conventional plants] also produce so much more power that merely sending somebody by once a year to glance that the greed led is still softly glowing is more maintenance per watt."
That could be an interesting hypothesis, but if you put it down like a hard fact, you should also provide some data to support it so that we can have a meaningful discussion about it.
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Maintenance costs on wind are insane in comparison to others (including most of the other renewables). One of the main problems with ROI on wind turbines is that they require massive amount of maintenance due to severe mechanical stress on certain key parts like the gearbox. It's the same reason why most of the turbine has be be removed and new one installed about every 12 to 15 years. Metal simply becomes too fatigued from massive amounts of stress it's put under during usage.
That is one of the parts that
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Are the blades carbon fiber yet? I just visited the Boeing 787 manufacturing plant today and that thing has carbon fiber wings and a carbon fiber body. They had several display sections and it seemed really, really sturdy.
It's the kind of thing that is mostly expensive due to labor, which means volume and automation could do a lot to make it cheaper.
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It's not the blades. It's the transmission and generator. As in the plant itself. Forces they must withstand are tremendous, and they can't be overly big or heavy.
Blades, as far as I know, are usually either composite or aluminum alloy.
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Modern designs don't have gearboxes.
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Direct drive turbines are notably less efficient, much heavier and their reliability is questionable at best. Not to mention the ridiculous costs, the generator requires about ten times the neodymium to function compared to generator on plant with a gearbox for example.
As a result, their installed base is tiny, while wind turbine gearbox market is projected to double over this decade at the very least.
Real-time market approach (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, some times technology really disillusions people, no? The fact that it is *possible* to provide real-time pricing as per demand-supply, does not automatically imply that this is the preferred approach. If supply-demand cycles need to be connected, that could also happen at the weekly, monthly or even yearly timeframes. In fact, doing so is probably more fair and more manageable for all parties. After all, that's already related to the current trend in many developed (european?) countries: you pay a flat fee per month for utilities and then some correction fee by the end of the year. Why not walk this line?
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Because the excess of supply or excess of demand are by the minute or hour, not by the week, month, or year.
It's somewhat like buying a last minute airline ticket. If people were unwilling to pay more for a last minute ticket, all tickets would cost more (fine) but it would be impossible (because the airlines would price tickets to insure every seat was sold - or oversold - many hours before wheels up to minimize the risk of a single empty seat) to get a ticket on a commercial airliner to get to mom's bedsi
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I rather doubt that people will actually react to electric prices changing. Unless there are discernible and predictable patterns most people will not notice a change in the price. Even if there is a big fat indicator of the current price visible, do you really think people will turn of the TV and turn down the heating?
Re:Real-time market approach (Score:5, Interesting)
It's somewhat like buying a last minute airline ticket. If people were unwilling to pay more for a last minute ticket, all tickets would cost more (fine) but it would be impossible (because the airlines would price tickets to insure every seat was sold - or oversold - many hours before wheels up to minimize the risk of a single empty seat) to get a ticket on a commercial airliner to get to mom's bedside 1500 miles away before she expires.
Airline tickets are an interesting one; and other products that have a relatively inflexible supply - i.e. the costs of flying the plane are basically the same whether or not that seat is sold, and similarly you can't sell more seats than you have, so the supply is inflexible. There are two opposing forces at work here:
1. The airline wants to ensure that every seat is sold, since filling a seat at the last minute increases profit, even if it is sold for below cost (the plane is flying anyway, the costs can't be avoided, selling the seat rather than flying with it empty is beneficial no matter how cheaply you sell it). This is going to tend to push the prices down for "last minute" sales as the airline tries to attract sales.
2. The passengers that need to get somewhere at short notice are willing to pay a premium. This is going to push the "last minute" prices up as the airlines cash in on this willingness to pay over the odds.
Figuring out which of these forces wins is certainly a non-trivial exercise.
By increasing prices when demand approaches the absolute maximum supply, consumers will reduce demand quickly (good, since supply can't be increased quickly). When power gets expensive enough, they will shut off rooms, wear more sweaters, turn lights off, instead of cooking a fancy dinner they will nuke something in the microwave and use disposable utensils (or, just wait to wash them until the next day), they will sit around in a single room and talk instead of playing on their computer or watching TV in individual rooms. Demand is extremely elastic, supply is inelastic at the top end. In extreme cases, they will shutdown their entire house (using winter shutdown procedures as needed) and gather in friends and neighbor's houses (perhaps, splitting the cost of the very expensive power during those times).
I think expecting people to monitor electricity prices on a minute by minute basis and change what they are doing _now_ is (largely) not realistic - virtually no one is going to look at the electricity price before deciding to put the TV on, for example. What is realistic is getting people into a routine - if people know that it's always cheaper for them to put the dish washer / washing machine / whatever on over night, then a reasonable proportion of them will probably choose to do so. In fact we've had this in the UK for decades - you can subscribe to an "Economy 7" tariff, which gives you more expensive than normal power during the day and then 7 hours of cheap power each night. Unfortunately the "more expensive than normal during the day" bit tends to make it an unrealistic tariff for anyone who doesn't use electric storage heaters.
I can, however, see a possibility for automated algorithms deciding when to use power - e.g. telling the dishwasher "automatically do the washing up when it'll be cheapest" and having it sit there monitoring the instantaneous electricity prices and automatically doing the right thing. Or loading the washing machine with instructions like "this washing needs to be done some time in the next 3 days, do it when the power is cheapest". This is essentially the same as having computers doing stock-market trading. The interesting bit will be when many people have the same device and they all decide the power is cheapest at the same time, causing a surge in demand and raising the prices.
Import (Score:3)
Denmark will just start importing more fossil fuel bassed electricity than they do now.
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Denmark is a net energy exporter.
Hydrolysis (Score:3)
Make hydrogen when the sun shines and the wind blows. Burn hydrogen when it's dark and quiet.
Even with really bad conversion, it's cheaper than maintaining a nuclear plant just for backup.
Pump water instead (Score:3, Insightful)
Pumping water up a hill and then produce hydro power at peak times. This is an established technology, maybe 60% efficient. There is one setup here near Brisbane AU. Things do not have to be exotic.
(You do need a hill, Denmark may need to rely on its neighbors.)
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I think Hydrogen energy storage is at 65%-70% nowadays. But you are right, I had forgot about the reverse dams and I think it's easier to sell to the public "We store energy in a very large pool of water." than "We store energy in a very large tank of hydrogen (which fill level is eventually going to be checked by a Darwin award with a lighter.)"
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No, you'd run a couple nuclear plants to provide the baseload.
For backup in cases where the power might have to be provided for a couple weeks at a time, but only for about that long a year, I'd take a serious look at biomass.
Store up enough wood chips and such and you don't need to burn wood/gas to cover an outage. Have an equivalent of Fairbank's BESS to provide power for long enough to get it fired up.
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Re:Hydrolysis (Score:4, Informative)
The round trip efficiency [energystorage.org] of hydrogen storage is only 30% to 50%. That means that you would have to put in two to three times the energy that you get out. In the base of that electricity stored in hydrogen will cost 2 to 3 times as much a usual.
Secondly hydrogen is difficult to store in large quantities. It leaks through solid steel and unless cryogenicly stored has a very low energy density.
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We're not talking about sunlight. We are talking about electricity. Photons vs electrons and all that jazz.
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You should read up [solarabcs.org] on maintenance procedures for solar panel installations. One does not put up hundreds of panels and walk away.
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So PV more expensive to maintain than thermal or hydro power stations?
I never said PV was more expensive to maintain. I was just countering your argument that, once installed, PV electricity was free.
when a thermal station goes down, that's a whole lot of adjustment the whole grid has to make. A PV cell or panel?
I don't see how this is related to your first statement. I was talking about the fact that there is a fixed cost to maintain solar panel installations.
It is all about baseload (Score:5, Insightful)
So
those sneering are probably people having no fucking clue on electricity generation and usage , or even how to store energy. Probably the same groups which want to kill nuclear, while at the same time being OK with coal, despite coal releasing more radioactivity and killing an impressive number of people every year worldwide (miner as well as people suffering from various illness due to the pollutions).
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. The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable.
The issue is not predictability but dispatch ability. One can predict pretty well how much electricity will be produces using weather forecasts and dawn/dusk calculations. A problem is that this will only tell you when renewables will run short. The main problem is that one can not adjust the inputs to compensate for these shortfalls. That is where dispatch ability comes in. With conventional generators one can, within limits, turn up production. One can not turn up the sun or wind.
Real problems, but there are also solutions (Score:2)
There are real problems, but there are also solutions. You can do much more to control demand on shortish timescales. No one will notice or care if the aircon or heating to their huge office building switches off for a few minutes, or if their electric car only charges 90% of minutes it is plugged in for.
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They will complain if the HVAC is off for an extended time or their car in not charged enough to get to work and back. We are not talking about shortages that last a few minutes at a time but maybe a few hours or a few days.
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There will need to be a range of solutions certainly, but there are lots of candidates. They need proving out at scale, and not all will succeed but a few examples:
Pumped water storage will hold gigawatt hours easily,
hydro plants can be designed to let you take their (fairly fixed) annual capacity out in bursts, if you like..
Denmark is a bit flat, but it's also not far from Norway.
On a timescale of days you have some warning from the weather forecast, so you can shut down some industrial processes
an
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Pumped water storage will hold gigawatt hours easily,
These require significant height differences between the reservoirs and huge amounts of water.
Denmark is a bit flat, but it's also not far from Norway.
Craggy mountains that freez in the winter do not make good places for water reservoirs.
On a timescale of days you have some warning from the weather forecast, so you can shut down some industrial processes
That would cause issues with delivery schedules making your products less desirable on the market and cause big issues in the economy.
and you can spin up cheap gas plants.
Which would have to be maintained even when not in use adding to the overall cost of electricity.
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"Probably the same groups which want to kill nuclear, while at the same time being OK with coal"
They aren't alright with coal, they just refuse to accept that once you take Nuclear out of the picture, there aren't a whole lot of options for base load.
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The more the almost immediatel
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"The problem is that you cannot predict how much will be produced with renewable. Only conventional power allows power generation predictions."
Not true at all, there are plenty of renewable options that are predictable, just that wind and solar aren't either of them.
Hydro and tidal are good examples, a hydro dam can be built with enough of a buffer against drought that there's still always enough to run and the tide isn't going anywhere in many places. Geothermal is another good example.
Okay yes there are e
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Base load is not even as hard as peak load. Sweden for instance has solved base load using nuclear and regenerative hydro power, but they still have to import coal power from Denmark for peak load. Denmark switching from coal will also mean Sweden has a problem, or will have to import from Poland where the coal plant are less efficient and polutes more than the Danish ones.
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Why don't they build a few more nuclear plants? A higher baseload means you have a higher peakload, and since nuclear is emission-free, it doesn't matter if you're not always using all of its output.
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Do you have any idea how low the energy density of hydrogen [dalefield.com] is? One would have to pump a lot of hydrogen under very high pressure to move much power.
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The problem is with the low temperatures and/or high pressures needed to pump enough hydrogen to transport the required energy. The technology for moving large quantities of hydrogen around is not simple.
Temporary (Score:4, Interesting)
This can only be a temporary problem. If those guys have a properly functioning electricity market, energy storage companies will bite. Obviously, this would work much better if end-users/suppliers were actually billed the actual electricity price instead of some kind of average. That way, they could change their behavior to match it or even consider storing their self-produced electricity. This could get a major boost if the electricity prices would be available in real-time to your fridge, washing machine, car charger and solar batteries.
What could also help tremendously, is if the countries around them shared the same ambition. If not, they will keep stuffing the hole until a major electricity dip comes around sometime mid-winter and the Danes will blackout.
Re:Temporary (Score:5, Informative)
This is a permanent problem, and one that they were warned about, repeatedly. Greens in the government just pretended it doesn't exist until it's now hitting them square in their faces. Germany is hitting the same problem with Energiewende right now.
The situation is this. Denmark produces mostly wind power nowadays. Wind power is installed mainly offshore. That means that they have huge peaks and huge offtime. Europe had wholesale electricity prices set on electricity exchanges for years now. What that means is that large producers and users buy and sell energy based either off current price, or long term contracts that usually take those peaks into account.
For actual producers, this means that free market sets the price. I.e. when wind blows and everyone is creating a huge peak, electricity price can actually dive into negative for reasons I'll outline in a moment. And when it's down due to too much or too little wind, you have a huge demand for electricity to replace the lost load driving the prices up.
Now for the reason for negative pricing on electricity. Normally renewables like wind functioning in fully free market would be massively unprofitable when installed in sufficient numbers because they would all produce at once > price collapses due to massive supply and lack of demand > they never get a good price on their electricity. And at the same time when they cannot produce any energy, only base power kinds of power plants produce energy and get to net a premium.
So how do you make renewables make money when they can only sell when price is cheap and not when it's more expensive? The answer in Denmark and Germany has been to legislate priority tiers depending on your "greenness". Essentially, not a single watt of non-renewable energy can be sold on exchange until all of renewable capacity has been sold. At the same time, same legislation prevents reliable non-renewables and renewables from spinning down their plants while they legally cannot sell anything they produce. The result is absurd. They end up paying just to get someone take the power they have to produce off their hands. Hence negative electricity prices during peak times for non-renewables who can sell their electricity on the exchange after renewables took all the offers with actual money on the table.
This obviously leads to the problem where it's unprofitable to keep the non-renewable plants operating, so operators just shut down the plant. Except that woops, if they do, you have grid blackouts as a regular occurrence because there's not enough base power when wind isn't blowing and you actually stand to lose the entire grid to a blackout. Something that is unheard of in modern Northern Europe.
TL;DR Essentially, the reality is that the market is functioning too well, and as a result to make renewables profitable legislators had to massively shaft everyone else with punitive measures. And now that everyone else has been penalized into unprofitability and want out of the business, the brutal reality of the fact that wind is dysfunctional as base power is starting to hit everyone in their faces.
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This is only a problem if you require your backup non-renewable sources to make a profit. Otherwise you just run them as a cost of having an otherwise very clean and cheap electricity supply.
In any case, grid level storage is already an economically viable proposition. Japan has demonstrated some installations that work well. I expect we will see German fossil fuel plants installing batteries so they can run at a lower average output and still cover the high demand periods they are required to.
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The problem is that reality doesn't care about people and their well being either. But people in the government actually have to. At least here in the Nordics.
Which is why there are people who keep raising this question before the reality throws the system off the cliff.
Denmarks reliance on "green" taxes (Score:2, Informative)
Somewhat OT, but... Denmark is very reliant on the tax revenue derived from "green taxes" to pay for it's vast social programs. So much so, that acting green is left to your conscience, and may actually cost you dearly. A few examples:
Taxes on cars are at roughly 180% this means that cars with new fuel-saving features become unfeasible, hybrids like the Toyota Prius is simply too expensive and almost none are sold in Denmark. 100% electric cars were excluded from the 180% tax, but this is bound to change as
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Was about to post about exactly this.
I live in Denmark and my father wanted to install solar power a few years ago.
He quickly found out that's a very bad idea, since the costs to the government would be significant.
They tax you on the generated power output, and require you to sell excess to the local power company, which they naturally also take income tax on.
They say they want us to go green, but yet they tax the hell out of it.
Oh dear (Score:2)
I guess selling the largest energy provider and infrastructure in Denmark to Goldman Sachs is not going to help that goal.
solution is like medicine..... (Score:2)
1. any producer registering on the exchange has to declare both the maximum and the minimum that it can make available to the grid over a yearly period in 30 minutes interval;
2.additional payments to the grid are made by producers on a log scale proportional to the difference between the two, i.e.gas turbine plants, who have a continous productions, would make addit
Article is retarded - here's the situation (Score:5, Informative)
Look, energy production is hard stuff, and the reporter here clearly didn't understand ANY of the intricacies.
Basically the situation is this: you have a consumption curve that you need to meet at every instance. It is important to understand that this is a curve with daily peaks. These peaks MUST be met or you get riots in the streets.
If you erect a wind turbine it will produce power as the wind blows. Same with solar and the sun. When you match the resulting production curve up against the consumption curve, there will be gaps that you need to fill in some other way.
Nuclear power is a bad way to fill the gaps. Due to high capital costs, to stay economical a nuclear plant usually needs to produce 100% all the time until it needs refueling (which takes a month I think) where it will produce 0%, in other words a flat line with some clearly defined gaps. But we need to match a curve with gaps, so a flat line doesn't help much.
Instead you need something you can dispatch relatively quickly without costs going through the roof. Currently stuff like hydro, biogas, biomass, etc.
In Denmark, besides all the wind turbines we have a bunch of big coal plants. These plants are currently being transitioned to biomass (i.e. wood pills and chips) and will fill in the gaps, as well as produce heat for district heating (which is really big in Denmark, winter's cold up here).
If these plants get into financial trouble, the national grid operator Energinet can increase a fee on each kWh (the PSO) and use the extra income to pay some of the plants for standby services. Besides this, we have really good grid connections to Norway where they have a ton of quickly dispatchable hydro. The connections to Norway are a two-way street - they get cheap wind turbine power in return which makes it easier for them to get through the winter without running out of water (very little water flows to the dams in winter because it's frozen).
Hence, apart from the transportation sector where we're waiting for Tesla and the like to come up with better electric cars, there really isn't anything tricky or hard about the transition away from fossil fuels in Denmark.
It was tricky in the past because wind turbines used to be expensive, but the industry has matured and wind is now the cheapest source of new (undispatchable) kWhs. Really, the only political question left is whether we should try to save some of the biomass by building more off-shore wind turbines.
It's also true that our current path is a bit more expensive than a fossil-based base scenario - I think it's supposed to be around 100-200 USD per inhabitant per year in 2050. So not overwhelmingly expensive.
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Not such a good idea if "giving it a go" means electricity bills that are not affordable by a significant portion of the population and days where all electricity is shut off. Risking a country's economy on "a go" is not good policy.
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http://rt.com/news/184600-isis... [rt.com]
http://cphpost.dk/news/danes-w... [cphpost.dk]
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.... [gatestoneinstitute.org]
That is just retarded. Non-white immigrants and descendants of immigrants only make up 300,000 people in Denmark, or short of 6% of the population, and hasn't been raising since the immigration laws were tighten in the late 90s, and since then they have gone from tight to being outright silly, and no major political party is seriously trying to bring them back to sanity let alone the immigrant positive levels of the 20th century.
Somehow this fact has escaped the nationalist right wing, who rose to power to
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Helping people become liberal and desiring of human rights, is an issue which has gotten entangled with ethnocentric nationalistic (what people call "far right") views.
Unfortunately this has meant that the multicultural movement has avoided questioning the far right wherever it is found (Europeans do not have a monopoly on being racists). This in turn has given more ammunition to the European far right to promote racism against foreigners. It is quite tragic really.
The only place to resolve this is to simpl
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And your sources are:
- Russia Today, a Kremlin propaganda mouthpiece.
- Copenhagen Post, which despite being described as "neutral" is deeply tied to Jyllands-Posten which is well-known for its right-wing views.
- Gatestone Institute, a notorious neo-con and anti-muslim think tank.
TL;DR: You lose.
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Oh boo whoo, your racist bullshit got called out and now you're mad. Go cry me a river.
My source is that I actually live in Denmark, right in the middle of the Greater Copenhagen Area where most of these supposed problems should be, and you know what? It's all bullshit, there are no such "widespread" and "endemic" problems.
I meet plenty of muslims (along with hindus, sikhs and plenty of other denominations) in my daily life, and you know what? They're all every bit as friendly, courteous and non-outwardly-r
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Actually, let me refute the very first statement from that Gatestone Institute rant:
Muslim immigrants in a town near Copenhagen have forced the cancellation of traditional Christmas displays this year even while spending lavishly on the Islamic Eid celebration marking the end of Ramadan.
This is completely false. Muslim "immigrants" (in reality second- and third-generation Danes with a non-Danish heritage) did not force the cancellation of traditional Christmas displays.
What actually happened is that the purchase and installation of a Christmas tree was put to the vote in the owners association, and since no one stepped up to manage the purchase and installation (despite there being plenty of non-muslims in