Green Germany Risks Running Out Of Power

By Paul Homewood

 

 

Reuters report very real concerns in Germany that power cuts could be looming:

 

 

The country, the biggest electricity market in the European Union, is abandoning nuclear power by 2022 due to safety concerns compounded by the Fukushima disaster and phasing out coal plants over the next 19 years to combat climate change.

In the next three years alone conventional energy capacity is expected to fall by a fifth, leaving it short of the country’s peak power demand. There is disagreement over whether there will be sufficient reliable capacity to preclude the possibility of outages, which could hammer the operations of industrial companies.

The Berlin government, in a report issued this month, said the situation was secure, and shortfalls could be offset by better energy efficiency, a steadily rising supply of solar and wind power as well as electricity imports.

Others are not as confident, including many utilities, network operators, manufacturing companies and analysts.

Katharina Reiche, chief executive of the VKU association of local utilities, many of which face falling profitability as plants close, said the government’s strategy was risky because it had not stress-tested all scenarios. She characterized the plan as “walking a tightrope without a safety net”.

Utilities and grid firms say if the weather is unfavorable for lengthy periods, green power supply can be negligible, while storage is still largely non-existent. Capacity aside, the network to transport renewable power from north to south is also years and thousands of kilometers behind schedule, they add.

Stefan Kapferer, head of Germany’s energy industry group BDEW, said it would be risky to rely on imports. “Conventional power capacity is falling nearly everywhere in Europe and more volatile capacity is being built up,” he told Reuters.

The government rejected such concerns, saying the likelihood of plant crashes or identical weather conditions across Europe was remote.

Regardless of reliability, however, Germany becoming a net power importer would have major consequences for the whole continent, whose power markets are interlinked under EU single market rules – and are dominated by exports from Germany.

The shift comes at a time when nuclear plants in France, another major exporter to the rest of Europe, are ageing fast – meaning it is also increasingly likely to rely on imports.

https://www.thegwpf.com/green-germany-risks-running-out-of-power/

 

 

There is a naive assumption amongst politicians and environmentalists that Germany will be able to readily import electricity at times of stress. That might not be as simple as it sounds.

BP Energy Review

 

Currently, coal power supplies a fifth of the EU’s generation mix, and nuclear another quarter.

With Germany’s plans to shut all nuclear plants by 2022, and French plans to reduce nuclear to 50% of their mix by 2035, there will be a sizeable drop in the contribution of nuclear power.

Add in the projected loss of coal power demanded under climate policy, and the mix in 2035 could look like this:

Assuming the other sectors’ shares remain the same, there could end up being a generation gap of 27%.

Of course, this does not reflect the potential increase in wind and solar generation. However, as we all know, this is extremely unreliable, and there is no evidence at all that the whole of the European grid can depend on such unreliable energy for long periods.

In reality, the situation will almost certainly be much, much worse by the 2030s.

If things go according to plan, demand for electricity will go up in leaps and bounds, with decarbonisation of heating and transport. Consequently the generation gap will be much larger.

Far from cutting back on baseload capacity, we should be investing in much more, rather than relying on ephemeral renewables.

 

The German policy of relying on others to plug the gaps created by their own short sighted political agenda is simple minded at best.

When the same policy is enacted at the EU level, it is suicidal.