Coal Still Dominates The Energiewende
By Paul Homewood
The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany has produced a detailed study of electricity trends there up to Nov 2014.
Based on Jan-Nov comparisons, these are some of the highlights:
In terms of capacity, wind/solar account for about 42%. Note also that nearly all of the wind power is onshore.
When it comes to actual output though, it is a totally different story, with wind/solar only providing 15.8%. Note that nuclear is still generating more then wind and solar together; Germany still faces a huge problem into how it can replace nuclear power.
Meanwhile, coal and gas still supply the bulk of Germany’s power, contributing 52.6%.
Crunching these numbers tells us that the actual capacity utilisation of wind and solar are 14.9% and 10.6% respectively. Remember that when subsidy hunting renewable firms brag about how many homes they have the “capacity to supply”.
Of course, there are enormous variations in the efficiency of wind and solar, as the weekly outputs below show.
To all intents and purposes, solar becomes irrelevant in winter months. The output of just 0.06 TWh in week 49 represented less than 0.6% of electricity output, and suggests a capacity utilisation of less than 1%.
Wind fares little better at its lowest points, contributing only about 3% of total generation in week 40.
Daily figures are even worse still. On 21st January, solar produced just 0.006 TWh.
It is hard to see where Germany goes from here. Merkel has committed to close all nuclear sites by 2022, but their output can only reliably be replaced by conventional fuels.
Current conventional capacity is probably just enough to cover extra demand, though it will be tight. However, since renewables are already producing as much as they can, gas and coal output will need to rise by some 15% to cover the shortfall.
And what happens to Germany’s CO2 targets then?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
And 43% of that coal is lowest-ranking lignite.
I don’t think they actually care about their CO2 output. Otherwisw why would they be building so many Coal fired power stations.
The contribution of biomass is interesting. I’ve found a short web page – somewhat old (2010) that says:
of the 2.15 million hectares of crop land currently used to produce biomass, 650,000 is now devoted to energy crops for a biogas units. The biggest crops remain rapeseed (a type of which is known as canola in North America) to produce biofuels and corn, grain, and grasses for biogas.
Farther down it says:
the figures do not make clear whether some of these crops are actually the waste product of food production, such as when straw or the woody part of plants is used.
We cook with Canola Oil and this might be expected to have a higher value than burning it for steam-electric or just heat. Further, over the last 50 years there has been great interest in no-till planting and leaving the crop residue in & on the soil. “Sustainability” issues would favor soil concerns over thermal use for crop waste.
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http://www.renewablesinternational.net/german-biomass-growth-continues/150/515/28940/