Link here to Der Spiegel.com.
Behind this worry stands the transition to renewable energy laid out
by Chancellor Angela Merkel last year in the wake of the Fukushima
nuclear disaster. Though the transition has been sluggish so far, Merkel
set the ambitious goals of boosting renewable energy to 35 percent of
total power consumption by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 while phasing out
all of Germany's nuclear power reactors by 2022.
The problem is that wind and solar farms just don't deliver the same
amount of continuous electricity compared with nuclear and gas-fired
power plants. To match traditional energy sources, grid operators must
be able to exactly predict how strong the wind will blow or the sun will
shine.
But such an exact prediction is difficult. Even when grid operators
are off by just a few percentage points, voltage in the grid slackens.
That has no affect on normal household appliances, such as vacuum
cleaners and coffee machines. But for high-performance computers, for
example, outages lasting even just a millisecond can quickly trigger
system failures.
A survey of members of the Association of German Industrial Energy
Companies (VIK) revealed that the number of short interruptions to the
German electricity grid has grown by 29 percent in the past three years.
Over the same time period, the number of service failures has grown 31
percent, and almost half of those failures have led to production
stoppages. Damages have ranged between €10,000 and hundreds of thousands
of euros, according to company information.
Sounds like Germans are going to be buying a lot of surge protectors and uninterrupted back-up power supplies. And personal / private generators, I suppose.
Maybe Germany should convince the French to Allowing Fracking of the Shale in the Paris Basin. This basin has been compared to the Bakken in size and TOC. Hess had a JV going with a local company Toreado ( sp ) .. Now Hess has backed out and the french venture is dead..
ReplyDeleteSell the oil to the english, and use the NG for Elec production..
Any time central govermint does the planning and executing of a project it is a Mess..
The Eurozone just gives me a general feeling of economic suicide with a) Hollande in France; and, b) cost of renewable energy in Germany.
DeleteIt will be interesting to see how this plays out.