Germany Is Running Out Of Electricity
By Paul Homewood
September 29, 2022 |
More demand for electricity, fewer fossil-fuel power plants, but (still) too little renewable energy: The energy transition is changing the structure of the power supply in Germany. A new study by the EWI shows the possible consequences for security of supply.
With the expansion of renewable energies, the weather dependency of electricity generation in Germany is increasing. A new analysis shows that the security of electricity supply in this decade is currently not guaranteed in all extreme weather situations. Decisive factors here include the rising demand for electricity due to progressive electrification, the dismantling of fossil power plant capacities and the relatively slow expansion of renewable energies.
This is the result of a new analysis by the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne (EWI) on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne. In the publication “Analysis of Supply Security up to 2030”, a team from the EWI examines in which (historical) weather situations the power supply is secure at all times and under which circumstances supply gaps could occur in the course of this decade.
Supply gaps in extreme weather situations
An analysis of weather data from 1982 to 2016 shows that supply gaps could occur in particular during weather situations with strongly below-average wind availability in northern and central Europe and significantly limited solar radiation in southern Europe. These two weather anomalies occurred in combination, for example, in January 1997 and in December 2007 over an extended period of at least seven days.
For such extreme weather situations for power generation, the EWI team analyzed and quantified the possibility of supply gaps for the years 2025 to 2030 in different scenarios of the electricity system development. In doing so, they looked at different paths to coal phase-out, renewable energy expansion, electricity import availability and storage capacity, and the degree of electrification between 2025 and 2030.
Not only controllable capacity can increase power supply resilience
The team of Tom Brinker, Berit Czock, Hendrik Diers, Dr. Philip Schnaars, and Dr. Johannes Wagner cites a variety of factors for the likelihood of supply shortfalls occurring in the extreme weather situations considered. For example, ongoing electrification this decade, particularly of transport and heat, combined with a reduction in controllable power, is one reason for higher peak loads. “Making electricity demand more flexible is therefore of significant importance for the security of electricity supply,” says Schnaars, manager at EWI. However, the individual influencing factors should not be considered in isolation. Additional wind and PV capacity can also help to increase security of supply in extreme weather situations, he adds. This additional benefit is greatest when surplus energy can be stored and then used to cover peak loads, he adds.
Figure 2: Electricity generation in 2030 in a historical extreme weather situation without coal capacity with an accelerated addition of renewables
In the scenarios considered, an accelerated coal phase-out by 2030 as envisaged in the coalition agreement means that more and larger supply gaps could occur in the period under consideration. These are larger by an average of 5 GW and occur 60 hours more per year than with a coal phase-out by 2038. These potential supply gaps can be countered with additional renewable generation capacity, especially in combination with additional battery storage. What all the scenarios considered have in common is that electricity imports from abroad make a significant contribution to meeting German electricity demand. “A reduced possibility to import electricity from abroad has a major impact on the security of supply in Germany. This highlights the need to look at security of supply at the European level,” Schnaars said.
https://www.ewi.uni-koeln.de/en/news/versorgungssicherheit-bis-2030/
I’m not sure what good extra wind and capacity will do, when the wind has stopped blowing and solar is producing next to nothing in winter! Twice nothing is still nothing!
What is clear from the chart above is that Germany will be dangerously over-reliant on imported electricity, even with a large dollop of gas generation, once the coal and nuclear plants are shut.
And forget about this just being an “extreme weather “ scenario. Pretty much every winter there are periods of days on end when wind power is at extremely low levels.
In January this year, for instance, there was a spell of four days towards the end of the month when wind power ran at around only 5 GW, and shorter periods where there was much less still:
http://energodock.com/germany/electricity-generation
Nuclear and coal contributed about 16 GW during that time, whilst demand peaked at 70 GW.
According to the new study, Germany will need about 50 GW of gas generation, when the wind stops, and even then will need a further 20 GW of imports. But according to S&P, Germany only actually has 30 GW of gas generation now, including what is in the pipeline. It is not clear how EWI have allowed for this?
Whether Germany will actually be able to buy the gas it needs, and whether the rest of Europe will have surplus power to sell is another question.
Meanwhile Germany’s energy future increasingly resembles playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
This reminds of a joke which denigrates a particular nationality – TRIGGER WARNING!
Why did the Arabs have all the oil and the Irish have all the potatoes?
Because the Irish were given the choice.
I once heard, on the BBC many years ago, a comment by an Israeli when discussing an Arab Oil Embargo that went something like. “if only Moses had turned right and not left after crossing the Red Sea things would have been so different”
Every energy expert said that Energiewende would end in a disaster.
Note “the Energiewende is the ongoing transition by Germany to a low carbon, environmentally sound, reliable, and affordable energy supply. The new system intends to rely heavily on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and energy demand management”.
They didn’t say that “energy demand management” meant blackouts. I guess by reliable they meant that Germans could rely on blackouts. As for affordable – what a joke.
With decades of experience in energy management, I assure you that BLACKOUTS is the only way you will realize demand management.
You can do a lot with de-industrialization. Look auto production in Germany. It’s currently half of what it used to be. There are plastics manufacturing plants in Germany that use as much natural gas as a small country. Energy economics will dictate that this be off-shored, probably to the US. Steel, aluminum and polysilicon not to mention battery materials are all energy intensive industries. China will be making those things with cheap Russian gas soon.
Whether they mean to or not, Germany has an excellent de-industrialization strategy.
“Demand management” is just a fancy way of saying rationing.
Smart meters are just a way of making it easier for them to disconnect you (manage your demand).
…or your blackout.
Epping Blogger.
The local distribution company can disconnect whole streets to isolate for faults (safety) and for essential maintenance (reliability). There are regional control centres do this centrally/remotely, plus there are automatic protection relays on the network to disconnect when faults occur.
It is already straightforward to disconnect you. It couldn’t be any other way for the safe, managed, and reliable operation of the network.
If it is done as a matter of choice (not the automatic relays), there has to be some public interest justification. Rota disconnection is such a control measure, where the justification is avoiding a more widespread shutdown of the network. In the 1970’s, individual streets were shut down for a few hours to share the issue of shortage of power supply. I recall street codes being broadcast on TV to let us know when we would take our turn, allowing us to prepare.
Smart meters make little or no difference to this reality of operating the supply network.
If it’s disconnection at house level versus street level, or some wider local level, it has to be available for the network. The concern about whether smart meters give the industry some ability to disconnect you is moot. If you haven’t agreed an interruptible supply (probably meaning some discount in your tariff), the same public interest test would apply, smart meter or otherwise.
Yes, of course they can disconnect whole streets / circuits and with effort even individual homes. It is much lkess effort and therefiore it will be practiced in the ways they want, to do it to smart meters.
I was a student and then working in Edinburgh during both miners strikes in 1972 and 1974 Being a young man living in shared flat we used the BBC broadcasts to plan where to be during outages. Set off just before your power went off, arrive at friends flat or a pub just after the power came on. Not much different from normal in fact.
The Three Day Week didn’t affect my work as the process in the factory involved continuous operation that lasted more than 24 hours, 2 or 3 days in some cases.
I was communting from nothe of London to Croydon and the underground and main lines were running a thin service. Passageways in the tube stations were illuminated by parafine lamps hung from nails or conduits near the ceilings. I had to do the work from a battery or gas lantern and my eye sight was wrecked by it.
Just think how businesses and home lives depend on IT these days and the effect of power cuts will be devastating. Foolish politicians for bringing us here. I hope the whole lot of the political class get tarred with this and we can have a near complete clear-out.
Sorry Epping Blogger, but that’s a display of tinfoil hattery.
It runs the risk of discrediting the discussion – if visitors to the site see that kind of comment.
The industry is licensed and operates under numerous conditions to act even-handedly towards customers. If the industry has two groups of customers who are largely the same other than their metering, int is not permissible to interrupt one group before the other because “it is much less effort”. The legal position is that one customer would have been discriminated against, having received inferior service for nothing more than the convenience of their service providers.
Any industry players who tried to play this game would be putting themselves at risk of losing their license (disqualified).
I am not talking about discrimination.
I am concerned that such measures, as well as the reported ability to discharge EV batteries to support the national grid, as facilitating the unstable power supply to which our political class has become so fond.
If it isn’t all part of a plan to subjugate us they are giving a very good impression.
Discharging EVs to “stabilise the grid” is pie in the sky and doesn’t work.
We cannot get significant flows out of the local distribution network from individual households using batteries. Batteries are not synchronous machines and use solid state electronic devices which leaves them unable to support frequency control, to manage network voltage and secure the proper operation of the protection relays I mentioned above.
Too many batteries trying to supply power from households would destabilise the local network.
Messing customers around (without their agreement) is not possible for the discrimination points mentioned above. Even if many customers agreed to use their rooftop solar and EV’s, there are technical obstacles to getting much of a contribution to national security of supply.
The only meaningful contribution hundreds of thousands of households can make to security of supply is to collectively cut demand. Hence rota disconnection is still being discussed today after many decades of pushing these new technologies and fanciful talk of what we might (one day) be able to do.
Smart meters have some useful purposes, but more for commercial reasons like payment and settlement, and demand side control, but demand side is only possible at individual customer level with their agreement (which means financial incentives).
For the reasons I have given above, smart meters are not some sinister new way to control individual customers. It’s time to stop talking about smart meters in this context as it is tinfoil hattery.
Jordan, your comments make a lot of sense but I am left wondering why smart meters are equipped for remote disconnection. Is it just a practical measure so that a property can be isolated without needing access?
Mikehig
Assuming the capability to disconnect, I would suggest the best explanation would be commercial reasons.
I don’t know if smart meters (or all SM’s) are equipped to disconnect. My smart meter is a very small device in a plastic box. I doubt there is a 60 ampere isolator in there (certainly not mechanical and maybe not a solid state device either). I would have expected a heatsink and a metal casing for a device capable of remotely switching up to 60 amps (your supplier will hate the risk of remotely setting your home on fire).
It is worth keeping in mind there are two (separate) “people” who could do this.
Your local (monopoly) distribution company who owns the network running up to your meter. You never chose them, so they are the ones who need the public interest justification to disconnect. They are the ones who would implement rota disconnection.
Your (chosen) electricity supplier is the person who offered you commercial terms, including your tariff. If they have the facilities to do it remotely, they might disconnect you, but this form of disconnection would be commercially agreed with you (e.g. a lower priced interruptible tariff). Your agreement means using this is not discriminatory.
Keeping with that, I noticed some news today, where a couple of electricity suppliers are offering discounts/rewards to customers who will agree to reduce demand, when notified. But I don’t know how they would do it: it doesn’t necessarily remote disconnection using the smart meter. Demand reduction could be in the customer’s control, and checked using meter readings (and punishments for failure to curtail when instructed).
A final comment is the use of demand management to “time shift” consumption. This is suitable for shortage of power generating capacity (cropping peak demand), but not shortage of primary energy (fuel). We have to be careful to make that distinction: shortage of primary energy has fewer options to mitigate, and is the worst of the two.
My point is that smart meters make it easier for them. I do not think we shjoud do that. They messed up reliable energy so I see no reason to help them.
Epping Blogger
There is a fair point that smart meters could segment the market.
The government has really stamped all over the retail market. But let’s assume the government gets out and leaves the retail market to develop more sophisticated tariffs which differentiate and segment the market.
One way would be “firm” and “interruptible” domestic tariffs, quite familiar to the commercial and industrial sector. Interruptible tariffs would be expected to have lower price for the lower quality of the supply.
But it could go much further. The industry refers to these as “PPAs” or Power Purchase Agreements.
If I could choose, I would like to be able to purchase a multi-year “thermal” tariff, where energy is supplied at a price linked to full cost of coal and gas fired generation.
People who are big fans of nuclear should be able to do the same, with multi-year tariffs linked to the full cost of nuclear generation.
It would be for investors in new power stations to secure signed-up multi-year contract customers to make the investment case.
And people who love “green” energy should be able to purchase electricity on terms linked to the full-cost and availability of their chosen technology. If those tariffs are linked to production of renewable energy, then so be it. Customers who don’t like the intermittency could also have a standby and top up contract to supplement their renewable supply.
We are nowhere near this at the moment. I’d look at market differentiation and segmentation as a possible step in the right direction. Again, I don’t see smart metering as something threatening or sinister.
As with so much, if this was a transparently commercial issue it would be more acceptable by choice. And a choice also to remove it and revert to a simple meter. The factr the government is pushing it leads to suspicion and rightly so. Governments have been accumulating poers over the citizens for far too long and far too intimately for freedom’s sake.
Jordan; I have never seen a smart meter but, from your description, a remote disconnection capability seems unlikely. However, I spent a few minutes on a websearch and found that it’s a muddled story. Quite a few results said meters have the facility (eg MoneySavingExpert), some said they don’t and other said it depends on the model/manufacturer of the meter!
I don’t have the technical knowledge to try and get into the design of the things, if such info is available. It would be very interesting to get a definitive answer to this puzzle!
On the issue of tariffs and demand management, I expect you are aware that there are time-of-use tariffs available. They are very popular with EV owners for the very low off-peak rates; 7.5p/kWh with Octopus, for example. Indeed some users have found that it is now cheaper to use their immersion heaters overnight than to use their boilers to heat water.
France has had split tariffs for decades, brought in to smooth demand when they went over to nuclear and adopted electric heating, etc.. It works well, looking at their demand pattern which has much lower peak:off-peak ratios than ours, proportionate to demand.
A problem with your enquiries would have been the multiple models and versions used, some of which are admitted to be defective.
In the UK we also had a lower night time price for electricity in the days when we had a lot of nuclear capacity, which is better kept running, and a surplus of generating capacity overall. As heavy electricity users in industry reduced consumption over night the surplus was available for a discounted rate. People used to have night storage heaters which were a mass of concrete which was heated overnight and dadiated or convected heat in the morning. All this has changed.
I expect there will be different types of smart meter regarding the ability to control supply. I have never been particularly motivated to check whether they can isolate the home for the reasons above.
Prepayment meters were always large boxes with a metal casing. Part of this would have been the coin slot (later card reader), and I expect another part would have been a mechanical isolator in the models. Things might have moved on, but likewise, it’s not something of much consequence to my mind.
Time of day tariffs have been a feature of the market for a long time now (“STOD tariff” for short). I should think Theresa May’s 2019 intervention to “the 4 tariff cap) didn’t exactly help, and the present sclerotic retail market will probably not yield much information about whether these are available today.
I read an interesting development recently with regards to EV supplies (cannot recall where – maybe a YouTube commenter). Apparently EVs will have to be separately metered from the rest of the household because charging an EV (transport) should attract standard VAT and not the 5% rate for domestic energy. Sounds like the Treasury might have twigged. If so, it would drive another nail into the “EV cheap” coffin. It could be part of the development of a more differentiate retail market I mentioned above.
When I recently had a dig around to see if I could get a quote for energy supply (nobody would), one of the first questions on the form was whether I have an EV and home charger, which seems to corroborate the suggestion of separate metering.
On EV chargers, you are right that the latest units have to be “smart”: this became law a few months ago.
In addition these chargers are pre-programmed to not allow charging at peak times. This function can be over-ridden by the owner if re-charging cannot wait.
Following the above conversation, I decided it was time to do some digging. So I got the make and model of my smart meter (Elster AS300P) and searched for its manual. I couldn’t find the manual, but the brochure says it has an “integrated contactor”, so things were pointing in the direction of capability for remote disconnection.
The brochure also says it complies with UK requirements from March 2011, and I looked to see what I could find there. Around March 2011, the Government consulted and then produced a smart meter specification, including the following as standard requirements:
“Load management capability to deliver demand side management (including ability to remotely control electricity load for more sophisticated control of devices in the home)
Remote disablement and enablement of supply (including support remote switching between credit and prepayment modes)
To answer Mike’s question, it’s maybe not so muddled after all, UK smart meters are expected to be capable of remote isolation.
Whiles acknowledging Epping Bloggers concerns, I don’t feel particularly concerned myself and. On balance, I would prefer to see more choice in the market and if smart meters can help that, they should be a net positive IMO.
Jordan,
Thanks for that bit of investigating.
I am not a fan of smart meters or, to be more accurate, the way they have been implemented here. The programme is ruinously expensive at £15 bn and counting. The early versions were rubbish and it’s not clear that the later ones are much better: there are reports that they may be vulnerable to hacking.
They are of little use to the consumer other than showing the instantaneous consumption. Anyone who wants to check on the consumption of individual bits of kit is better served by a £10 gizmo from Amazon which allows individual consumers to be monitored.
Lastly they run on the old 2G bandwidth which, it is reported, is due to be re-allocated sometime after 2025 at which point every meter will have to be modified or replaced.
Totally unnecessary. Petrol and diesel work and don’t have the range, charging time and lack of manual transmission problems that EVs have.
Adding LPG would have been better than electrification
The electricity capacity problems were already there before adding the unnecessary EVs
>>ongoing electrification this decade, particularly of transport and heat,
CNG is a marvelous fuel for ICEs. Low carbon, low NOX, negligible particulates. And if the hopeless shower in Parliament get their act together, home-grown.
JF
Have a gas Jeep, great.
We had them in Australia until the Federal govt. more than doubled the excise to get more money.
The buses in Poitiers used to be LPG/GPL. You could sit at a cafe 0n table in the street have a nice lunch or whatever with these buses passing and not be blasted by smoke and fumes. Haven’t been there for a long time but I guess they now use electric buses so you may end up barbequed.
Idiotic. Why add unnecessary electricity consumers that are simultaneously LESS practical and MORE expensive?
>>ongoing electrification this decade, particularly of transport
Headline in Die Welt
Prepare for blackouts that last more than 72 hours
This is no longer future theory, but a real possibility this winter.
The entire thing is so crazy and illogical that it can only be deliberate.
It is. It’s “the plan” and we are all subject to it unless we wake up.
Indeed, it’s almost as if the rush to Net Zero has actually been a race to the ‘Year Zero’ all along. Crashing the grid of a modern, industrialised & IT connected economy for days on end, the inevitable consequence of current energy policies, will unleash dark forces that might be a tad difficult to constrain. One can only assume that that is the whole point of the exercise because it’s not as if those in charge haven’t had enough warning of impending doom to change course already.
Derek, you underestimate the power of decadence.
“These potential supply gaps can be countered with additional renewable generation capacity, especially in combination with additional battery storage.” That keeps being trotted out. and it’s just a wet dream: the cost and space requirements for significant battery storage is humungous. No chance.
California has the same fantasies. And will get the same problems.
So the Greens will just claim that hydrogen (green of course) is the answer. What they won’t discus is how adding more demand to the grid would result in stability.
And using electricity to generate hydrogen which would generate electricity (at 23% THEORETICAL efficiency) doesn’t strike me as sustainable.
Batteries are net users of electricity. We want more electricity, not more expense.
The function of “battery storage” is not electrical. It is to get people to believe renewable energy is viable. It is a faux fix for intermittency.
Everyone needs to start asking for proof of concept before allowing renewable energy to displace existing reliable sources. Where I live the sun is ideal and there are many people with solar panels and battery storage yet they all still remain connected to the grid for backup, and pay for it.
‘This is the result of a new analysis by the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne (EWI) on behalf of the Society for the Promotion of the Institute of Energy Economics at the University of Cologne.’
And how could they be wrong, with a title like that?
Humble pie time. Re-load the reactors and make some difficult decisions leaving lignite as a last resort.
The problem there, is it’ll take about 2 years to produce the fuel rods for the reactors.
I wonder if they have any experience of trying to start up a grid from scratch? It’s not a simple process, it takes a long time, and you can cause major damage to your generating plant if you get it wrong.
They will soon have to do it for real….
It took nearly 6 days in South Australia after the state-wide blackout (except Kangaroo island where the local power station had been equiped for such) on Thursday Sept 28, 2016.
This from Wikipedia and is largely crap.
So much of the network had been shut down, the authorities needed to act carefully to bring it back online and provide a stable network. This was initiated in the first few hours following the start of the outage, initially using the Victorian interconnectors to establish a stable frequency on the network, and gradually add South Australia’s power generators to the network and restore power to areas as soon as possible. The initial focus was to restore power to the Adelaide metropolitan area, and suburbs started to regain power within about three hours, and much of the city power was restored by 10 p.m. (Not so) By the following morning, power had been restored to most of the areas of Adelaide and the areas south and east (Not so. In the Adelaide Hills it took 5 days for me and I know of at least one town that was blacked out for 8+days) of it that did not have storm damage to the distribution network. The substantial damage to the transmission network north of Adelaide meant that large areas of the Mid North and Eyre Peninsula did not have power restored within 24 hours, and further damaging weather indicated that it could be at least the end of the weekend before some of those areas were restored. (Following weekend i.e. 10 days).
And earlier this year 2 wind farm operators were fined over a million dollars each.
The main problem is the balance of supply and demand, the demand is highly uncertain, how many appliances have been left switched on? In addition there is now a general lack of adjustable supply. Gushing headlines about batteries being used for this purpose are loved by greens, but when that happens everyone else should worry.
Some years back, lets see…about eight years ago, I worked with a Bosnian mechanical engineer. He was concerned that Germany was getting so far ahead of America with their energy policy. Funny that. I lost track of him around six years ago. I wonder what he thinks now?
Personally I’m glad Germany is ahead of us. I know a few other German / Austrians and I’m not saying I know any kind of a representative cross-section of central Europeans, but the ones I know are 100% for renewables, save the planet, blah, blah.
And this is all you get for it. And the planet is doing just fine.
So is the UK. National Grid are finally starting to come clean (but not really) on just how bad our position is. They are talking of power cuts they will pay for of up to 2GW, plus further rotating 3 hour power cuts of unspecified size with no compensation mentioned – something that won’t go down well with the public. Once again they like to pretend that wind will generate -16% of capacity in a stress situation, which should read zero. So that’s 4.5GW they are overestimating. We cannot expect to rely on any interconnector imports, and indeed we might even find ourselves outbid by France. That is 5.6GW of import we had last year that we won’t have this time. Meantime we have had coal and nuclear closures. They are trying to hide the reality. Their report carries few numbers, and charts with scales that are highly compressed.