Germany produces the power of 20 "nuke plants" through SOLAR GRIDS

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Niri Te

Could some of our German members comment, and give updates on this great news??
Niri Te

Just saw this, so I reply.

I think there is a lot of (deliberate) confusion in Germany and elsewhere about Germany and the "renewable energy plan". Therefore it is a bit hard to say what is missing from the picture, but I'll try.

This one is in the news yesterday and also in TV discussions:

Originally Posted by Niri Te

German Solar Subsidies to Remain High with Consumers Paying the Price - SPIEGEL ONLINE

So while it is true that Germany has already a high potential to supply renewable energy, of course the problems persist that it is expensive and it cannot easily be stored. The problem with expenses is what is in the news this week, but the main focus is not as much as to if it can be done, but rather it is who pays for it. Right now, private households seem to be complaining a lot about this, because some parts of industry are excempt from paying the fee that was put on electricity to pay for the switch to renewables. It seems to work that way, that every bit of electricity that is used has a fee on it that goes into a fund which is used to subsidize renewable energy projects. Now that sounds good at first - after all switching from cheap and dirty coal to solar power will obviously cost some money (the same is true for developing and building next generation nuclear power BTW). What makes people angry now is, that the largest industrial consumers of energy are excempt from that payment, leaving small businesses and private households to pay for multiple their share. This is reasoned by saying that otherwise that industry would leave the country and people would have no more jobs. (Seems like globalization keeps biting us in the behind).
The problem of intermittency is also not something that will be fixed immediately. The strategy of the engineers planning this consists of 3 points - one is a better grid to distribute power across Europe, so that North sea wind power can fill in the gaps in solar power generation in BAvaria on a cloudy day and vice versa - the larger that grid, the more likely it is that somewhere in Europe either the wind will blow or the sun will shine. The next is to build storage facilities - either pressurized underground caves (old gas reservoirs) or artificial lakes. In both cases large amounts of energy are stored (at a loss of course) for peak demands. The third is to actually build more natural gas power plants. These can eventually also be fueled with biogas. The advantage of these is that they can supply peak demand but can also reduce output very fast. This is unlike coal or nuclear which can only provide a baseload and cannot adapt to fast changes in demand. However obviously there will be a lot of demand for publicly owned power plants because these will not be operating at the economic maximum (since they have to shut down whenever there is wind or sun and then they make no profit). This is where free market economy stands a bit in the way of realizing the whole idea.

Originally Posted by Isard

The only problem being that the sun doesn't always shine.
Keep the nuke plants for days its shady, and sell the excess energy to neighbors imo.

See above - nuclear power plants are the worst at providing the energy for the shady days because they take hours to move from production to shutdown and vice versa - plus every such operation is a bit of a risk and it costs almost as much to keep them running at full power as to keep them running at half power. Nuclear is best at providing a large baseload. It is like an engine that can only run at full speed - great for long distances but useless without a technology that can serve when less than full speed is needed.

Originally Posted by Clarke

Those 2008 sq miles aren't necessarily contiguous, and some of it may actually be roofs of peoples' houses,

Indeed I think covering all houses and factories may be a good idea and in Bavaria there are massive amounts of solar panels on rooftops already. However it is also economic to turn agricultural land into solar farms which is not the best idea. To try and power all of Germany exclusively by solar power would not work. It will have to be an energy mix.

Originally Posted by Niri Te

Clarke, I get the feeling that you work somewhere in the nuclear power industry.
Niri Te

Yes, I get that impression as well.

BTW - regarding people being afraid of that little bit of radiation. Yesterday they had a piece on TV about butterflies in Japan. It seems that in the greater area around ****ushima, something like 2/3 of all butterflies have deformities - extra legs, deformed tentacles, missing eyes, discolored wings. This is so sad. And the scientists in that clip on the news were basically just worried if this also applies to humans who are living in the same area and if they should rather leave. Of course this is a concern (geez - imagine to raise kids in an area that is contaminated enough to deform butterlies massively and the kids bring them home from the park and ask you why they look like that). But other than human beings will not be able to just leave the area. the butterflies will not just go somewhere else. They will have to live there with the radiation for the next hundreds or thousands of years.
Even if one could build safer nuclear plants, no one can build them perfect enough to never fail like that again. By the way - France, the "great nuclear nation" that is enthusiastic about nuclear, spends lots of money in that technology and has more than ten reactors built between 1990 and now (less than 20 year old ones) - it failed miserably the european "stress test" for nuclear reactors that was conducted after Fukushima. And that "stress test" was a joke anyways because it basically only covered basic safety measurements plus flooding and earthquakes. Something like a deliberate attack, a planecrash and some other scenarios were not even considered.