Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
fossil fuel sources, such as costs of pollution, were taken into account. Indeed, the
retail price of electricity from rooftop PV solar power in Germany in 2012 was
comparable with that from fossil fuel sources, whereas it was two and a half times
as expensive even in 2006 (TE
2013a
). Yet all the subsidies and cost of new plants
and transmission lines has meant that industrial electricity prices in Germany have
doubled from 2000 to 2013, whereas those in the U.S.A. have remained similar, in
part because the shale gas revolution has substantially reduced gas prices, whereas
they were at parity a decade earlier (TE
2013b
). So the success in renewable energy
has created problems for the German grid, leading to suggestions that large indus-
trial plants be encouraged to create their own renewable energy plants to reduce
major transfers of power via the grid, while more energy conservation methods
should be adopted to reduce demand.
In Britain the costs of wind generation are also still high. There has been a con-
centration on large turbine development in off-shore wind farms, currently account-
ing for a fifth of its renewable energy but only 3 % of total energy. However this has
come at a high cost, for the $ 250 subsidy provided in 2013 is three times the current
wholesale price of electricity, and 60 % more than for the onshore wind farms, al-
though there is an expectation that costs will decrease as the technology of building
large units in difficult environments improves. At the end of 2013 the government
was continuing to expand the system, so that Britain should have 10 GW from this
source by 2020 (TE
2014a
). Further growth could lead to the country having a third
of its total energy, from a possible 40 GW offshore capacity by 2030, but only if
large subsidies continue.
Second, there are still
technological difficulties
to be faced in improving
efficiencies—especially in wind and solar—although substantial progress has been
made in the last decade. Few solar panels are able to achieve more than 15 % ca-
pacity, although recent advances are increasing this to 25 %. The limits and lack of
flexibility in the current silicon-based panels is leading to research to find better
compounds for solar generation and ones more flexible than the rigidity of silicon.
In the case of wind there is often a great difference in generation rates, making it es-
sential to choose sites with string and regular wind flows. Many turbines operate at
about 25 % capacity, given the number of calm days, although offshore sites usually
have much higher rates. These two problems are unlike the situation for fossil fuel
use, where many initial technological difficulties have been solved by a century or
more of advances in the extraction and use of these sources, while they have costs
advantages as many existing plants have covered many of their initial capital ex-
penses. So although the cost of the 'fuel' in solar and wind plants is relatively free,
they have high initial capital costs to construct and install the panels and turbines,
so many still need subsidies or long-term output contracts to make them worthy of
investment or use.
A third problem is the need for large amounts of
costly
new and more complex
transmission lines,
not only to deal with the projected increases in energy demand,
but also to take power from the sunny or windy areas which are often in the periph-
eries of countries to the points of consumption in cities. In Germany it has been esti-
mated that at least 4,000 km of new lines are needed (TE
2013a
). Many of the routes
