A tale of two........

[solarsavings]

Countries.
Anyone else read this

The more a country depends on such sources of energy, the more there will arise – as Germany is discovering – two massive technical problems. One is that it becomes incredibly difficult to maintain a consistent supply of power to the grid, when that wildly fluctuating renewable output has to be balanced by input from conventional power stations

Read more here Germany's wind power chaos should be a warning to the UK - Telegraph

 

[confounded]

Countries.
Anyone else read this



Read more here Germany's wind power chaos should be a warning to the UK - Telegraph

The author of that article is so vehemently against renewables (countless similar articles) it is impossible to take him seriously or comprehend what his agenda is.

As one of the comments below shows there is always and opposing view.

German grid reaches record reliability in 2011 - 100% renewable - Renewables International

German grid reaches record reliability in 2011

On Monday, Germany's Network Agency announced that the German grid only had a downtime of 15.31 minutes, even lower than the already impressive 17.44 minutes of downtime during the period from 2006 the 2010.

 

[Gavin A]

complete rubbish isn't it.

An aluminimum smelter would have had it's power shut off briefly because it was on an interuptable supply contract, which means they've agreed in advance that they can have their power shut off occasionally for brief periods as a part of the grid balancing mechanism. If shutting them off for a brief period really did cause them damage, then they shouldn't have signed up to the contract. Personally I can't see that it's likely to hav caused damage other than a brief shut down of operations, which is the price they pay for cheap electricity rates the rest of the time.

And by being only equivalent to 5GW running continuously, does he mean that German wind produces over 50% of the annual UK nuclear generation, or 25% more than our biggest coal fired plant at Drax running full flow 24/7?

As for energy intensive industries looking to leave Germany all together... well at least they've still got a few, most of ours have already gone, probably in part because we didn't invest in UK manufacturing plants for wind when we could have done, and are now going to be importing most of the kit instead from forward thinking places like Germany.

This sort of nonsense all stems from a rubbish academic study of the impact of wind in a closed steady state electrical grid, with just one gas generator, that then concluded that without wind the gas generator could just run efficiently at steady state, whereas with wind it needed to be running as spinning reserve to instantly back the wind up. That dizzy economist Ruth Lea then used this as the basis for a report that took these findings and extrapolated them wholesale onto the UK grid, and assumed that wind on the UK grid would also need to be fully backed up by spinning reserve.... totally ignoring the fact that the UK isn't a steady demand grid, that it already needs something like 1-2GW of either spinning or fast reserve back up with or without wind, that it has 3GW of pump storage that can be brought on line in seconds flat, and that the rest of any back up can then be supplied by gas plants that aren't actually operating at spinning reserve, but can start up reasonably fast enough to support any more sustained lulls in the wind.

In a nutshell, it's complete rubbish by people who know nothing of how this stuff works, but get paid by those who've got an anti green agenda to write plausible sounding copy to attempt to discredit the renewables industry in the public eye (and for MP's consumption).

Not that there aren't issues with the integration of that level of renewables generation, particularly at the same time as a politician arbitrarily decides to cut all nuclear out of the mix on a whim instead of as part of a carefully managed programme... but they're just engineering challenges that can be overcome, and the HVDC interconnectors they have in the pipeline will help significantly with this.