Don’t underestimate the corrupt politics of some countries, especially Germany. There are individuals actively working against the global cost curve and trying to misallocate the capital to gas at the large scale. Katherine Reiche is the primary example. She’s pushing for building as much capacity for gas plants as possible, instead of choosing battery storage as the cheapest option.
Ha, yes, a lot of deniers/delayers are going on about how Germany "wasted" billion on renewables, when in fact they had a booming solar industry, which got nuked by politicians, who changed the policies, as can be seen in 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us".
Was the subsidy system which was in effect in 2010's unsustainable? I think so, yeah. But the changed policies resulted in companies producing solar going bust, and the Chinese firms, which were doing fine, were able to buy out the patents and know how.
So, did Germany waste billions? Yes, but by letting the solar producers go bust.
The billion spend on renewables in Germany were not "wasted", there were spend on the primary goal of the German Energiewende, to allow Germany exit nuclear electricity power production.
The 39C3 video "Recharge your batteries with us" is an emotional call to action "We Can Do It!" solar panels everywhere, without showing the other backbone of the German electric grid: the German gas and coal power plants.
I would recommend other CCC video:
"Deaths per TWh"
The Price of Energy and Reducing CO2 Emissions
Solar panel production is extremely energy intensive. Germany has one of the highest energy costs in the world. So there was no way for Germany to maintain a competitive solar panel industry.
They could also just split the Germany into multiple bidding zones, then north parts of Germany would have a lot of cheap wind power, similar as in Sweden.
Over the figurative dead body of Bavaria. They want cheap energy for their industry, they don't want wind power because it's ugly and bad for tourism, they will maybe accept a little well-hidden solar power, they don't want overland cables because they are ugly, and they don't want underground cables because they heat and dry out the ground. There is also some market distortion because energy is traded as if transfer capacity was unlimited, but when Bavaria buys cheap wind power that can't be moved, they still pay the cheap price but the energy is locally "replicated" at e.g. gas power stations, which is paid by... OK, I forgot, but it's a terrible system.
These "they" are different Bavarian persons and groups depending on topic, but the net effect is that Bavaria is Germany's energy bully.
Fortunately, several gigawatt-class HVDC lines are coming online this year. These somehow happened despite the protests, it's a minor miracle.
Sweden has lots of potential for long-term energy storage as hydro power, which makes wind power viable. Northern Germany is mostly flat and there's not even close to enough storage capacity (on the order of ~weeks) to make a wind powered grid economically competitive.
There has been a long standing request to split Germany into multiple price zones[1], because Germany as a single zone does not adequately match the underlying network transmission limitations and there have been multiple occasions where power flowed through neighboring zones, which in turn required both network upgrades[2] in the zones neighboring Germany and expensive redispatch[3] in the south Germany. Industry in the south of Germany fights this back as this would mean the energy prices in the south would rise (and drop in the north), as when the transmission lines are congested, the prices start to diverge.
Keeping Germany a single zone is essentially a subsidy to Bavarian industry. The industry fights this so hard that it has basically become an energy insider joke.
If someone had guts (not the current governments) they would split the Germany into zones and all the Bavarian whining about “ugliness” would fade rather quickly when the prices went up.
Not sure if you're serious, but this was not viable in the 2010s, or even today in Germany at all because of Germany's high latitude: No matter how efficient solar panels become, they will always be more economical to operate closer to the equator. Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.
> Anyway, the Chinese factories for the most energy intensive parts of solar panel production mostly run on coal power.
That's because China itself is mostly coal, not because of anything magical about particular sources. However, coal is now in decline even in China: https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/china
Before someone (accurately!) says the decline in coal is tiny and one year doesn't make a trend: This is likely to continue until there is no more coal for the same reason the UK also completely stopped generating electricity from coal: cost.
PV's absurdly cheap. China has a lot of land, doesn't need to care about optimal use of the Gobi desert.
As much as we could discuss the independence of Katherine Reiche from gas industry, how much new gas power plants could be replaced by battery storage? Not much. The new gas power plants will be the backup of the electric production after Germany shuts down coal power plants. This backup, or call it insurance, is for weeks long times when wind and solar don't deliver enough, the famous German Dunkerflaute. There are research projects for long duration energy storage systems, but building using current battery storage technology for week long Dunkerflaute that occurs once a decade event would be extremely expensive.
You have to have a backup, the devastating effects of week long electric blackout in winter in a future Germany heating homes with heat pumps, would be comparable with a major war.
Will there by push, after the new gas power plants will be build, to use them not only as backup, but as gas peakers? Probably yes, but this dependents on future CO2 emission costs and natural gas costs.
Even the previous government was planing expansions of gas power plants.
Personally, I think Germany should have not exit nuclear energy production but expand it, but this error was made in 2000s and Germany has to live with the consequences.
I agree. Parent comment is making extremely generalized statements, about German cars with overconfidence. There’s not a single “German” car, it’s a huge ecosystem of brands like VW (Audi, Porsche), BMW, Mercedes. I’m quite sure they don’t have the single “user-hostile” interface.
They all look the same, e.g. like sh*t IMO, so although the above statement sounds overgeneralized it doesn't meant that it doesn't generalize well. IME it does.
White people in the U.S. aren’t just the “rich” subset of the whole population. They are reflect a complete spectrum, from poor to rich. They’re equivalent to Koreans in Korea or Japanese in Japan. Other groups in the U.S. aren’t just economically different, they’re sociologically different in dimensions that don’t really exist in Korea or Japan.
For example, 71% of hispanics speak Spanish at home. That reflects a group that’s comprised mostly of immigrants and their children. That poses additional challenges to education, beyond the economic differences. Poor whites in the U.S. and poor Koreans in Korea may have educational challenges from being poor. But that poverty isn’t layered with being raised in a household with immigrant parents who are in an unfamiliar country and probably don’t speak English fluently. That’s an additional layer of challenges that needs to be accounted for in comparing across countries.
