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The following chart depicts the cost development for consumers from the EEG feed-in tariff, from 2003 to 2014, (eeg-kwk.net):
Posted on 07/28/2014 10:00:29 PM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
The price of a stabilized green power grid is very steep, one could say it is like a “hockey stick”
Story submitted by Eric Worrall (h/t John Droz)
Coal and gas electricity companies are being paid up to 400x times the wholesale price of power, in return for helping to stabilize the German electricity grid.
According to Bloomberg, “Germany’s push toward renewable energy is causing so many drops and surges from wind and solar power that the government is paying more utilities than ever to help stabilize the country’s electricity grid.”
“At the beginning, this market counted for only a small portion of our earnings,” said Hartmuth Fenn, the head of intraday, market access and dispatch at Vattenfall AB, Sweden’s biggest utility. “Today, we earn 10 percent of our plant profits in the balancing market”.
Given that lignite coal plants are also playing this game, according to Bloomberg, and lignite plants are famously inflexible, you have to wonder exactly how fossil fuel plants are providing the required flexibility.
One interesting possibility is that the CO2 belching fossil fuel utility companies are spinning their generators up to full power, and are simply discarding vast amounts of excess energy, until solar or wind output drops – so they can be ready to dump extra capacity onto the grid at a moment’s notice.
At 400x wholesale rate, they could afford to burn away gigawatts of power as waste heat, and still make a handsome profit from the “balancing” fee for whatever energy they actually supply to the grid.
The graph above is from this article at No Tricks Zone, which is reporting on the effects on consumers in Germany.
They took California’s folly and expanded on it.
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The following chart depicts the cost development for consumers from the EEG feed-in tariff, from 2003 to 2014, (eeg-kwk.net):
Unit can kick in up to 15 Kwats .
fyi
They are way out in front o California. If the electric company would pay me the wholesale rate less an administrative discount I’d be happy and making money.
For some reason homeowners with solar are locked out of the market.
I was referring back to about the year 2000 folly. Solar is fine but you have to have some sort of a backup for the days that the sun isn’t as bright.
See #4.
My state democrat legislature voted through the California model back about nine years ago and the democrat governor sign the legislation into law. Currently my state is starting to see the first rate increases, within the past month, due to adoption of the California model. People on fixed incomes are going to be wiped out, in my state, or left to die on Medicaid. With rises to medical, food and now utilities (within five years or less) my state will see our poor substantially poorer but the poor, in overwhelming numbers, voted for the democrats that installed the California model in my state. In recent interviews, with many poor, have seen all the poor are as happy as Happy of the Seven Dwarfs though there are a few Grumpys in the bunch that realize what is beginning to occur. Blindness begets more blindness one supposes but Happy isn’t going to be Happy much longer if Happy is on a fixed income.
Like a great big freaking coal-fired UPS, eh?
Next up: federal investments in the R&D of harvesting the mighty power of the rainbow. On deck: Processing unicorn dung.
There are some thing the Germans do well...but they’re off the rails on the stupid windmill/solar power and recycling. They’re obsessed, so when you try to put logic in the equation, it doesn;t add up. They really need to start freezing to death in the winter time for natural selection purposes...it is the only way this will play out.
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