Saw this yesterday and thought it was an interesting read:
It is often claimed that renewable energy is cheap and will get cheaper as costs fall. Yet the prices paid by consumers have risen steadily.
watt-logic.com
The crux of the issue is that claims that rely on LCOE don't integrate the costs of firming into their models; the claims are made in a vacuum, which allows the lack of fuel cost to be spun as "close to free".
This chart from the article does a good job illustrating what it looks like just adding storage (not firming capacity):
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Another recent chart making its rounds on twitter illustrates how this has borne out in California:
View attachment 99112
This is obviously the result of "picking winners" and incentivizing them with tax or ratepayer dollars, the same scheme we saw here in Ontario with FIT contracts and LRP's, which had the exact same impact.
Of course the quintessential example is Energiewende, an extensive article on which can be found here:
Germany's Energiewende (energy transition) is a national program to change to a renewable-dominated energy system and phase out nuclear power. The government has estimated that the total cost of this could reach €1 trillion.
world-nuclear.org
A very interesting quote from the above:
Energiewende depends heavily on neighbouring countries for back-up power and as dumping grounds for occasional surplus. With high input from solar or wind sources the supply may exceed demand, forcing the power surplus into the adjacent grids of neighbouring countries, and obliging those countries to compensate for German intermittencies by running their own conventional plants at less than economic levels.
*snip*
In October 2016 BNetzA announced that from July 2018 the Austrian power market would be split from Germany. This “has become necessary, because power grid transmission capacity in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic no longer has the technical capacity to transport the power traded within the current common price zone even if a successful grid expansion is assumed in the long term,” it said, adding that at present TSOs had to carry out large-scale costly redispatching to ensure system security. “The need for redispatching measures has largely come from our inability to manage this transport capacity at the Austrian border. Congestion management is in place at other borders,” BNetzA said.
The Czech Republic is one of the adjacent countries affected by Germany’s grid problems. Since mid-2012 the 2 GWe Temelin plant has operated about 100 MWe below capacity as instructed by grid operator CEPS because of grid security issues caused by power surges due to renewable power production in Germany. The Czech Republic and Poland have installed phase-shifting transformers* on their German border to block German electricity dumping; France Netherlands and Belgium already had them. The Czech Republic is also boosting its lignite-fired generation capacity by 660 MWe at Ledvice, and CEZ has allocated €3.65 billon to refurbishing 11 coal and lignite power plants.
Interesting bit bolded and underlined there.
Also this statement:
An insight on the continued reliance on lignite can be gained from RWE, which in 2012 commissioned BoA units 2&3 at Neurath in North Rhine-Westphalia near Cologne (2200 MWe), billed as “the world’s most advanced lignite-fired power station” and costing €2.6 billion. Each unit can drop from full power by 500 MWe in 15 minutes and then recover as required, “demonstrating the power station’s ability to offset the intermittency of wind and solar power.” RWE said: “BoA 2&3 is an important element of our strategy, for modern coal and gas-fired power stations are indispensable. Unlike wind and solar sources, they are highly flexible and capable of producing electricity 24/7, which makes them the trump card of energy industry transformation.” The state premier said that the plant was “an important contribution to security of supply.”
Another good read on Energiewende from the IEEE, which contrasts its "success" to what the US has done with the shift from coal to gas:
Germany's far-reaching program to reduce the share of fossil fuels in energy has achieved almost exactly what the United States achieved, but at greater expense
spectrum.ieee.org
However, the "transition" makes sense once you read this from one of its promoters:
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The "cheap" angle is leveraged to get people (Americans, Canadians, Aussies, Brits...etc) to get onboard and assumes they won't do much in the way of research on the impacts that have happened so far, much of which has been the result of forced adoption (Germany, Ontario, California).
There is a Romanticism angle to Germany's pursuit of VRE that doesn't make sense to people who are comfortable with their current standard of living. Others who have emulated it without understanding that context (Ontario, I'm looking at you) have experienced massive push-back from ratepayers once the costs started to mount.
Shellenberger touches on this in his Forbes article from 2019:
Germans believed that the billions they spent on renewables would redeem them. Many of them will insist that the renewables effort was merely “botched,” but it wasn't. The Energiewende was doomed to fail.
www.forbes.com
The earliest and most sophisticated 20th Century case for renewables came from a German who is widely considered the most influential philosopher of the 20th Century, Martin Heidegger.
In his 1954 essay, “The Question Concerning of Technology,” Heidegger condemned the view of nature as a mere resource for human consumption.
The use of “modern technology,” he wrote, “puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such… Air is now set upon to yield nitrogen, the earth to yield ore, ore to yield uranium…to yield atomic energy.”
The solution, Heidegger argued, was to yoke human society and its economy to unreliable energy flows. He even condemned hydro-electric dams, for dominating the natural environment, and praised windmills because they “do not unlock energy in order to store it.”
These weren’t just aesthetic preferences. Windmills have traditionally been useful to farmers whereas large dams have allowed poor agrarian societies to industrialize.
In the US, Heidegger’s views were picked up by renewable energy advocates. Barry Commoner in 1969 argued that a transition to renewables was needed to bring modern civilization "into harmony with the ecosphere."
The goal of renewables was to turn modern industrial societies back into agrarian ones, argued Murray Bookchin in his 1962 book, Our Synthetic Environment.
None of this is to say that VRE doesn't have its place. Solar in particular, tends to, at moderate levels of penetration, match daytime peaking requirements for running air conditioning loads. Coupled with some moderate storage (PHES makes the most sense), this can reduce peaking requirements and peaking capacity is expensive. Wind can compliment massive reservoir hydro (see: Quebec) when pursued in a rational and measured manner by a large public utility, not as a subsidy harvest for fossil fuel companies who also provide the gas backup.
The issue is that neither of these technologies were allowed to organically integrate into existing systems as they could fit, rather, they were forced, typically via ideologically driven politicians, or ones that had been hoodwinked by VRE advocates passing themselves off as environmentalists. That's exactly what happened in Ontario and now we have copious amounts of wind that produces massively out of phase with demand and solar contracts up to $0.80/kWh that ratepayers are on the hook for on a 20-year term. California's duck curve is another artifact of what this looks like.
Grids were historical a system designed, by engineers, to service a need, and the most efficient way in which to do so was typically employed. The goal was resiliency, reliability and reasonable cost. Grid design now is being manipulated by folks with no understanding of the engineering and instead are driven by ideology, dictating capacity quotas for specific technologies with no reason applied to why, or what will be required to make it work; to retain the reliability and resiliency that are being undermined by technologies that are neither. This has been a challenge for operators and has led to things like blackouts, brownouts, load shedding (cutting off large industrial consumers) and capacity alerts like have been seen in California during hot spells. Resiliency and reliability suffer as the operators try and maintain stability, because black starts are not fun.
Hopefully, the situation in Europe has adequately laid bare the vulnerability to foreign fuel supply (Russian gas) and now that the emperor has no clothes, sane policy dictated by what works where with an overarching goal of emissions reduction through reason, research and expertise can be brought to the fore.
