ABC News Meteorologist Ginger Zee looks at the reliability of Clean energy, solar and wind.
Below, a couple of revealing graphs on comparative reliability of US and German grids.
As you know Germany gets about half of its electricity from renewable sources.
Most recent data shows that, forthe average German electric customer the average electric outage per consumer was down from 12.8 minutes in 2023, to 11.7 minutes in 2024.
In America, with about 20 percent renewable electricity, the average in 2022 was more than 5 hours.
To be fair, electric grids are complicated, and there are many differences between the German and American grids.
But any argument that renewables are fundamentally unreliable, are clearly debunked by real data.
Ginger Zee does a great job clarifying a lot of the things that people who watch Fox 24/7 need to be exposed to.
The weather conditions affecting different parts of the German and US grids are also very different – we’re a place with a lot of the most violent weather in the world, and climate change increasing the fires and floods. So those conditions can create local outages directly by knocking down transmission or distribution lines, flooding power plant sites, or knocking thermal plants offline due to freezing or to their cooling water being too hot, or streamflow too low.
Add in our new risk from the threats to frequency stability caused by just letting big AI data centers connect to the grid and we’re making things even harder for ourselves. In a way, though, that might also make it easier for growth in the same tech that’s bringing power to off-grid towns in Africa and Asia – solar/storage with self-islanding abilities if power from the grid drops.
But yes, part of the investments Germany has been making as part of their energy transmission has been to bury more of their power lines. Perhaps one of the benefits of being a nation without a powerful oil and gas industry. Germany’s also big on letting people add some solar without big permitting headaches. I’d love to be able to secure some panels to my south-facing balcony rails.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/how-germany-outfitted-half-a-million-balconies-with-solar-panels
“The country’s residents installed 200MW of balcony solar during the first half of 2024. It’s becoming an increasingly popular way to take climate action in Germany.”