Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Sources: European Energy Exchange Transparency Platform Data (2013); Federal Statistical Office of Germany
As you look at the jagged and woefully insufficient bursts of electricity from solar and wind, remember
this: some reliable source of energy needed to do the heavy lifting . In the case of Germany, much of that
energy is coal. As Germany has paid tens of billions of dollars to subsidize solar panels and windmills,
fossil fuel capacity, especially coal, has not been shut down—it has increased. 20
Why? Because Germans need more energy, and they cannot rely on the renewables.
In a given week in Germany, the world leader in solar and number three in wind, their solar panels and
windmills may generate less than 5 percent of needed electricity. 21 What happens then? Reliable sources
of energy, in Germany's case coal, have to produce more electricity. For various technical reasons, this
is even more inefficient than it sounds. For example, because the reliable sources have to move up and
down quickly to adjust to the whims of the sunlight and wind, they become inefficient—just like your car
in stop-and-go-traffic—which means more energy use and incidentally more emissions (including CO 2 ).
And what about when there's a particularly large amount of sunlight or wind? For an electric grid, too
much electricity will cause a blackout just as too little will—so then Germany has to shut down its coal
plants and be ready to start them up again (more stop and go). In practice they often have so much excess
that they have to pay other countries to take their electricity—which requires the other countries to inef-
ficiently decelerate their reliable power plants to accommodate the influx. This is obviously not scalable;
if everyone's electrical generation was as unreliable as Germany's, there would be no one to absorb their
peaks.
The only way for solar and wind to be truly useful, reliable sources of energy would be to combine
them with some form of extremely inexpensive mass-storage system. No such mass-storage system exists,
because storing energy in a compact space itself takes a lot of resources. Which is why, in the entire world,
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