Germany’s New Generation Of Coal Power Stations
By Paul Homewood
From Power Engineering International, news of Germany’s latest coal power station, that has just come on line.
Interestingly, they talk of “7000 full load operating hours for 2014”. This equates to running at 80% of capacity, so there is no suggestion here of operating just as a back up.
One senses a certain irony, though, when the MD talks of “the right balance between power plants delivering constant baseload and fluctuating power from the renewables”.
What we all need, of course, is the right balance between baseload and flexible back up capacity. Expensive,unreliable, fluctuating power has no place in the mix at all.
The new plant at Lunen follows the opening last month of another hard coal power plant in Dortmund, the first of ten new hard-coal power stations, amounting to 7,985 MW, that are scheduled to start producing electricity in the next two years, according to information from German grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur and operators.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Replacing how much nuclear?
There’s some interesting country information at world-nuclear.org.
Appararently, the 8 reactors so far removed from the German network were responsible for 8336 MWe.
The next scheduled to be switched off are Grafenrheinfeld (1275 MWe) in 2015 and then Gundremmingen B (1284 MWe ) in 2017.
However, after the formation of the new German coalition government the SPD Has the ministry of Energy&Economics as well as Environment (includes reactor safety) under their hat, so whether the schedule gets accelerated is anyone’s guess. Sigmar Gabriel, the head of SPD, did appoint 3 Secretaries of State from the Greens, so I don’t feel optimistic.
As a side- note, I visited Gundremmingen last summer (they have a public outreach program) and was impressed at how small, clean and quiet it was. unfortunately the Germans think that large dirty coal-fired power stations are better.
Molten salt reactors will take over power generation in the next twenty years…too bad the US who invented this tech at ORNL just gave the keys to China…http://in.reuters.com/article/2013/12/20/breakout-thorium-idINL4N0FE21U20131220
What? They have to use hard-coal. Didn’t anyone tell them they can get wood chips from the US east coast?
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From vision’s linked-to article:
“they (the US) believe China’s experiments may yield a breakthrough that provides an alternative to the massive consumption of fossil fuels.”
So there you are – the CAGW scare drives the US to help China do things US researchers should be doing but can’t because we spend our money on studying tree rings, building expensive wind machines, and helping rich folks drive costly electric cars.
And vision says “. . . will take over . . .”; but what does that mean? Is there a commercial or grid-scale project being built someplace? Several? One hundred? No. This technology may be the thing that eventually replaces much current grid power but at the end of the next 20 years the percentage contribution from TMSR will still be small.