For critics who scoff that Europe’s carbon emission reduction goals are unachievable, Germany has become Exhibit No. 1. Since Chancellor Angela Merkel decreed in the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident that Germany would phase out its nuclear power industry, coal use in Germany has been on the rise, and the country’s carbon emissions have remained stubbornly high.
Now it appears that tide may be turning. According to AG Energiebilanzen (“Working Group on Energy Balances”), an energy research firm, total energy consumption in Germany is projected to fall by 5% in 2014, compared to 2013, to the lowest level since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Coal consumption for the year is expected to be down more than 9%.
Those declines are due mostly to the mild winter in 2013-2014, but clean energy is expanding as well: Renewable energy use grew by 1.6% over the first 9 months of 2014, compared to the previous year.
Germany’s coal use carries particular importance not only because it is Europe’s biggest economy, but also because Germany burns mostly lignite or “brown coal,” the dirtiest form of coal, and because Germany’s green energy program, known as the Energiewende, is among the most ambitious in the world. While renewable energy production has expanded rapidly in Germany – accounting, at times, for 100% of the country’s power demand and forcing utilities to pay customers to consume electricity from conventional power plants – the nuclear phase-out has led to a rise in the burning of coal for baseload power supply.
Now, the government is at least considering shutting down coal plants. German minister Rainer Baake of the Green Party told reporters in late October that the government could come up with a plan as early as December to eliminate coal-fired capacity and boost energy efficiency programs. Earlier Der Spiegel reported that the government wants to eliminate as much as 10 GW of coal capacity. A decision will likely not come until next year.
Rainer Baake is a secretary, not a minister.
But good news.
“he German Network Agency plans to allow 12 conventional power plants to be shut down”
http://energytransition.de/2013/11/germany-to-shut-down-12-power-plants/
“Catalysts for the planned closures include under-utilization of mainly older fossil-fueled power plants amid the boom in renewables”
http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2014/04/energy-news-planned-power-plant-closures-grows-to-7-740-mw-in-germany.html
There is a discussion of capacity markets to keep some base load open. IMO, the market response should be to incentivize flexible generation, not base load, which the market is dumping, as it should.
And there’s good news from both France and Denmark, with Denmark trying to eliminate coal in 10 years time and France beginning to deploy alternate power sources:
“Solar capacity in France has grown exceptionally slowly; according to Reuters it had “5,095 MW of photovoltaic capacity in June, which accounted for only 1 percent of its energy consumption in the first half of the year,” in stark contrast with Germany’s 37,000 MW. But Neoen suggests that prudence in the early years may be key to France’s success.”
http://inhabitat.com/france-breaks-ground-on-europes-largest-solar-pv-plant/
http://motherboard.vice.com/en_au/read/denmark-wants-to-be-coal-free-in-10-years-100-percent-clean-powered-in-35
Speaking of flexibility..
“One of the benefits of energy storage is that it can respond in less than two seconds across the board,” Miller said. “If you are responding in seconds, you can take care of irregularities before they become a bigger problem,” he added. “If you have a frequency excursion and you arrest that excursion, then you remove the need for much of the spinning resources to take care of the secondary event.”
“So a comparatively small amount of energy storage that acts fast can displace a larger amount of spinning reserve generation,” he said.
His response to Younicos’ claim that 5 MW of battery storage can displace 50 MW of conventional energy was an emphatic “Yes.”
“An energy storage device can provide resources both up and down, so it can source 5 MW and also you can charge the battery,” said Miller. “So it becomes a resource in both directions, as opposed to a spinning reserve which can only go in one direction.”
“You also asked if battery storage could replace peaking power plants and the answer is ‘yes,” he added. “We have a significant amount of generation online whose only job is to take care of the peaks as they occur. Energy storage is much more efficient.”
It can significantly reduce individual customer’s bills by shaving off demand and peak power.
Energy storage can do the same thing for utilities. Currently, an infrastructure that transmits 8 gigawatts normally has to be built out to 19 – transformers, cables and everything – to be able to deal with a 19 gigawatt peak.
“If you could place storage strategically throughout the network so that you took care of those 8 gigawatts appropriately, you would not have to build up such a large infrastructure,” said Miller. “This would amount to significant savings globally across the grid.”
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/11/06/battery-storage-will-replace-many-peaker-spinning-reserve-plants/