This process has just started but needs to go much further. There are currently 1.4 million electric cars in Germany. If they charged @11KW during the day, they would draw 15.4GW, or roughly the equivalent of 3 Gravelines [1] nuclear power plants running in reverse.
However, most Germans pay the same for electricity throughout the day, so instead they charge when they arrive at home after work and Germany needs to cover 3 Gravelines worth of energy with wind, hydro, coal, and gas instead.
If consumers could charge with solar for 20 cents per kWh during the day or with brown coal for 80 cents per kWh in the evening, many would alter their usage.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravelines_Nuclear_Power_Stati...
I know Nordics do this already, it would be about time for the rest of Europe to follow suit.
It's always about the jobs.
The challenge on top is the replacement of coal after the exit from nuclear power. The anti-nuclear stance of many people and politicians in (West-)Germany is from the 1970s and the 1980s, especially when PershingII missles were installed in Germany. People of many other countries had no contact with nuclear weapons, stored somewhere in the wilderness. In Germany a nuclear missle facility was near to many people (I grew up next to a PershingII depot). Chernobyl didn't start the anti-nuclear stance but later accelerated it. So decades later Germany got out of nuclear energy.
Which now poses the problem of getting out of coal.
Solar when the sun is shining, windmills when the wind is blowing, batteries, hydro, and maybe 1 backup nat. gas plant when somehow all of that is out and you need to ramp up.
Looks like some more wind and a lot of batteries is what's left.
The current leaders in the Netherlands also want to start projects for new nuclear power plants. The Netherlands is also over producing apparently. Surely, they also should be investing in massive battery plants instead of new nuclear reactors.
Imagine the maintenance costs of protecting the nuclear reactors when the global warming flooding starts in these low lands.
There's no replacement for a nuclear plant yet for this purpose until a very large breakthrough is made. The only realistic large scale storage at this level is a dam and since the tech is old, most places in the developed world where one can be built has one already.
In summer they have plenty of energy that they don't know what to do with it and in winter they depend on France to not burn too much coal just to keep the lights on despite not even transitioning heating yet.
https://x.com/BM_Visser/status/1793536590821617769
160h with negative energy this year only (last year 71h on this date), Germany and Spain have around 140. Those water electrolyzers can't come soon enough
It can even happen on cloudy windy weekend days because of the massive wind farms
I thought about it, and to me it seems that ① having everything ready at the same time was not possible and ② PV ready first is the smallest problem.
Consider some of the alternatives. What would you think of your politicians if they built a bunch of batteries that lost money for years because of a lack of zero-cost midday PV? Or if they built lots of nuclear power that then turned out to be so expensive that big power users found it better to install their own PV and reschedule their power use around PV availability?
While increasing solar is certainly a success, falling short in wind, hastily getting out of nuclear years ago, heavily using coal, failing to even install a high capacity power line from the north to south to bring wind energy to where it's needed...Nimby-ism everywhere. Local state politicians that do nothing but populism aka Nimby-ism on a state level. Explosion of bureaucracy. You mention "getting everything ready". This just implies seeing the big picture and having a plan. Knowing our political system I have my doubts because it feels like it's too static and, if at all, rather reactive than active.
I'm sorry, sometimes I get taken away by negativity because of all of this and I forget to look at the bright (and sunny) side.
Having a lot of solar is good.
We can export it to neighbors and it motivates other actors in the market to invest in getting this cheap sun energy which creates more pressure on dirty energy.
That we don't life in a planed market is obvious otherwise all those things would not be necessary but we don't life in a perfect market
This evening batteries in California peaked at 6.3GW. Last year they were peaking at 2.3GW in the evening. I think that means is they installed 15GWH worth of batteries last year. That's close to 0.4KWH per person.
The whole economic landscape of solar and batteries has changed radically in the last 4 years.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz#First_cross-coun...
Unlike North America, most people in Europe live in apartment buildings not single family homes. The streets sides in my city are full of parked ICE cars like in most of Europe, but very few EVs, and even those are either company cars with chargers at the office or wealthy people from the suburbs with chargers at home. Where are the plebs without a house charger supposed to charge while at home? Via Starlink?
Alternative take: "If I wanted a giant, irreparable, disposable, spyware-ridden smartphone on wheels, ..."
Not that we’re there now, most places, but I think not requiring cars is a better goal than requiring them and putting a million chargers all over every city.
So "if you live in an apartment, you're in a city" is an incorrect statement.
According to [1], the installed battery capacity in Germany went from 6.7GWh in 2022 to 12GWH in 2023.
Given the growth and falling cost of battery storage, I expect that more and more solar will stored during the day and consumed in the evening, pushing out coal and gas.
[1] https://www.ees-europe.com/trend-paper/storage-market-boomin...
The press and the agitprop industry goons hired by the fossil fuel companies can gloom and doom all they want but it's all over.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/renewable-energy-stor...
The EU has battery tech research, also
There also basically always is more supply than demand because customers value reliability (possibly more so at times where demand is high)
What’s different here is that, for solar panels and wind power, the marginal costs of producing electricity are zero, that solar panel ownership is way more distributed, and that supply varies with the weather.
The main question for both cases though is whether the investment makes sense in the long-term.
Reality: 72 Euro/MWh https://euenergy.live/country.php?a2=DE
