Posted on 07/29/2021 4:49:19 AM PDT by MtnClimber
As a state or a country, if you want to have any status in the ranks of the climate virtuous, the key metric is your commitment to get most or all of your energy from “renewables” (mainly wind and solar) by the earliest possible date. Everybody is doing it, and you are nobody if you don’t get in on the bidding. Just a couple of weeks ago (July 14), according to Reuters, the European Commission entered a bid of 40% of final energy consumption from “renewables” by 2030. Back here in the US, the most recent bid from the Biden administration (from April 28) is a goal of 80% of electricity by 2030, which is ambitious on its own, although electricity is a minority of final energy consumption. Congress has yet to consider the Biden administration bid.
Within both the EU and the US, there are national and state champions that are far out-virtuing everybody else. In the EU, it’s Germany. Germany adopted its “Energiewende” way back in 2010 to transition its energy sector to wind and solar. Since then Germany has repeatedly ramped up its renewable energy targets. Most recently, in December 2020, Germany adopted by statute a binding goal of 65% of electricity from renewables by 2030. Here in the US, our champion is California. In California the governing law is the famous SB 100, enacted in 2018, which sets mandatory targets for the electricity sector of 60% from “renewables” by 2030 and 100% by 2045.
As readers here know, the Manhattan Contrarian from time to time has expressed a high degree of skepticism as to whether these mandatory targets are achievable in the real world. Indeed, I have often noted that at somewhere around 40 - 50% of electricity from “renewables,” it becomes impossible as a practical matter to increase the share of electricity from renewables just by adding more renewable capacity. As far as I am aware, no large jurisdiction to date has gotten its percentage of electricity generation from “renewables” up above 50% for any extended period of time. (If a reader can point me to an example, I will be very interested.)
But maybe I’m just a crank. Surely these geniuses in Germany and California must know what they are doing. So let’s check in on the latest news.
Germany
The website No Tricks Zone has a report on July 27 covering electricity output in Germany for the first half of 2021. The No Tricks Zone post is based on data compiled at a German website called Die kalte Sonne.
And the answer is that in the first half of 2020 Germany achieved the level of 50% of its electricity from “renewables.” But in 2021 that level fell back to 43%:
“The share of renewable energies in gross electric power consumption in the first half of 2021 fell from 50% to 43% compared to a year earlier,” Die kalte Sonne reports.
What happened? The wind just didn’t blow as much:
“The production of onshore and offshore wind energy decreased by 20%.” . . . The reason for the steep drop, according to the findings, was due to unfavorable weather conditions. “This year, especially in the first quarter, the wind was particularly still. . . .”
So did solar energy then pick up the slack? Unfortunately, no:
“[T]he sun output was low. . . . Solar energy output . . . rose a modest 2%.”
So how did Germany make up the difference? The answer will not surprise you:
“Coal energy saw a renaissance. Brown coal [lignite] power plants produced 45.8 terawatt-hours of the net power – that is the power mix that comes out of the outlet. That’s a strong increase of 37.6% compared to 2020, when only 33.6 terawatt-hours were produced. The net production by black coal power plants also increased, by 38.9% to 20.4 terawatt-hours after 14.4 terawatt-hours in 2020.”
Basically, Germany has hit the limit of what can be achieved by adding capacity of wind and solar power sources. To get to the higher levels of “renewable” market share that they have committed to, they will need to add large and rapidly-increasing amounts of grid-scale storage. So far, they have barely begun that process.
California
Perhaps you remember the excited headline from the LA Times from April 29: “California just hit 95% renewable energy.” April 29 was just the very day after President Biden had announced his goal of 80% of US electricity from “renewables” by 2030. Now California was already showing the world that they were way ahead and basically all the way to home plate:
Something remarkable happened over the weekend: California hit nearly 95% renewable energy. I’ll say it again: 95% renewables. For all the time we spend talking about how to reach 100% clean power, it sometimes seems like a faraway proposition, whether the timeframe is California’s 2045 target or President Biden’s more aggressive 2035 goal. But on Saturday just before 2:30 p.m., one of the world’s largest economies came within a stone’s throw of getting there.
(Emphasis in the original.). But maybe we shouldn’t get too excited just yet. First, although the author (Sammy Roth) says this was “95% renewable energy,” it turns out as you read further that he is only talking about electricity, which is only about 30% of energy consumption. And for how long did the renewables provide the 95% of electricity consumption?
Saturday’s 94.5% figure — a record, as confirmed to me by the California Independent System Operator — was fleeting, lasting just four seconds.
So what’s the real picture over the course of multiple months or a year? For that you’ll have to ignore the cheerleading reporters at the MSM, and try to find some aggregate statistics. Here are the figures from the California Energy Commission for the full year 2020. The total contribution to electricity supply from “renewables” is claimed to be 33.09%. Oh, but that includes 2.45% from “biomass,” 4.89% from “geothermal,” and 1.39% from “small hydro.” Take those out and you’re left with a big 24.36% from wind and solar. And since electricity is only about 30% of final energy consumption, that means that wind and solar are only contribution around 8% of total energy consumption in California.
Over at the website of California’s Independent System Operator (“CAISO”) they provide a chart for every day’s electricity production that dramatically illustrates the problem. California's peak electricity demand is around 40 GW, generally occurring around 6 - 8 PM. The large majority of their “renewable” production is from solar. Their current solar capacity, on a sunny mid-summer day like today, provides around 12 GW from about 9 AM to 5 PM — and nothing the rest of the time, including at the time of peak usage. In the winter, the output is more like 8 GW from 10 AM to 4 PM, and nothing the rest of the time. So far, they have almost nothing in the way of grid scale energy storage. In the evening, they ramp up the natural gas plants, and import power from Arizona and Nevada — mostly natural gas, nuclear, and coal. Close to 30% of California’s electricity comes from imports from neighboring states.
Is California going to meet its statutory mandatory goal of 60% of electricity from renewables by 2030? I know which way I’m betting.
Many thanks to Francis Menton for allowing posting of his entire essays from his site “Manhattan Contrarian” as long as a link and attribution are included. The articles are always very insightful.
I think California politicians are convinced that entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists have been “holding back” on green technology, no matter how fantastic, but will put out if the government just beats them with sticks, hard enough and long enough. So, put out by 2030, or else, you technology types! Because that’s how innovation works.
I think California politicians are convinced that entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists have been “holding back” on green technology, no matter how fantastic, but will put out if the government just beats them with sticks, hard enough and long enough. So, put out by 2030, or else, you technology types! Because that’s how innovation works.
If you use the 2019 numbers for Germany, an average 3-person home pays around 88.7 Euro ($105) monthly. Note, Germans don’t heat their homes with electricity or use AC units for cooling, so this is for plain regular home usage. You can also use the 1998 cost rate, and it’s 78-percent more.
So your German trend line, looking just ten years in the future, will be more than $150 for plain regular power. Chief reason? Coal plants will decrease, and nuke power is turned off in 2030. Wouldn’t shock me if the rate was near $200 a month (for just plain regular power).
California needs enough electricity for highways packed with electric cars.
Having 100% renewable electricity but only a third of what is needed is a good way to ensure the California economy collapses.
California probably needs more natural gas-fired generating facilities so it can broadly use electric cars. Over their lifetime, electric cars will have far less CO2-related emissions.
Electric rates are about 25 cents per kilowatt hour in Germany and about 10 cents per kilowatt hour in much of the US.
I’m almost positive that Germany imports a lot of electricity from France that is coal-fired. And lots of French nuclear energy.
Here is an idea. Pick a city of 500,000 people. Turn the entire city green. Every product that will be part of the city cannot contain petroleum products. Infrastructure and transportation has to run on renewable energy. This must be done within two years of adopting the plan.
The city will be monitored for five years. This includes “climate.” If after five years the climate in the city changes, a city of 1,000,000 people will now be tried. And on and on.
If wind and solar power are soooooo great then why are taxpayers forced to subsidize them sooooo heavily? After February’s deep freeze ask Texans how “great” wind and solar power are.
Renewable energy: the new state religion in some places.
Once you say the key phrase of renewable energy...its up around 60-percent that is imported. I think for nuke power (at least presently), it’s around 25 to 30 percent that is imported.
Non-technical people always think that its just an engineering problem.
I tell them: “All the simple things have already been solved”
Right now, unless we can solve the crucial fusion energy issues, we are in real trouble in the long term.
I say the District of Columbia is a perfect test city.
The Texas blackout this last February was caused in part by too much reliance on wind and solar, and not enough back up by on-demand carbon-fueled powerplants. Which also had their problems due to a lack of sufficient winterization, and lack of winterization of the natural gas wells and collection and distribution systems feeding them.
You can’t run the modern civilization we’ve come to expect on wind and solar. That large portions of the populace have been propagandized to believe you can is a real problem.
Much of the U.S. gets electricity for about 10¢/kwh ? Boy, I wish I could! We are paying about twice that here in Midwest flyover country. Of course our provider quotes a much lower rate, but as always the devil is in the details. The lower rate is only figured after you use a certain amount of electricity; it is a sliding scale. So, while they advertise low rates, they are in effect lying as to actual costs. So much for truth in advertising!
“A study conducted by Northwestern University in the US found that modules made by world’s biggest panel manufacturing country have about 30 percent lower energy efficiency in production and a carbon footprint about twice as high as modules produced in Europe or North America”
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/resources-and-recycling-needs-germanys-solar-panels
“Annual Average Price per Kilowatthour by State
(Lowest to Highest Rate as of 2019)”
https://neo.ne.gov/programs/stats/inf/204.htm
They learned their lesson when the oil companies suppressed the 100 mpg carburetor for decades.
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