Wind turbines in Denmark reached record level in 2014 (opens in new tab)

Beware of double-counting pumped storage.

Does that report mention consumption anywhere? This article is about consumption, not production, so it doesn't really make sense to compare this report to the article.

This is just a temporary problem. One alway could just switch wind/solar plants off, if there were really no other way to deal with the electricity. The problem is not so much with oversupply but, that there is not enough oversupply for other uses of electricity to become economical interesting, i.e. large scale storage, building long-range networks, power to gas, etc.

That surprised me a little, Germany oversupplying because of wind. Wind is about 10% of electricity there, but then I looked up variability and it explains why:

https://carboncounter.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/germany.jp...

Pretty crazy, it really calls for storage solutions doesn't it. Hell even if you had the same smooth wind every day, there'd be a huge demand/production discrepancy during sundown if enough wind is installed.

Norway uses mainly wind and hydro, Sweden mostly hydro and nuclear. When there's surplus wind energy, Sweden and Norway scales back on hydro and import from Denmark and Germany (through Denmark) instead.

> big problem

I can imagine worse problems.

Certainly, it's economically suboptimal. We do need storage or some other kind of energy consuming business that can absorb energy that's nearly zero-valued on the spot market.

But having so much excess renewable energy that it has to be pushed on other countries - and possibly forces coal plants to throttled back there - is not all bad.

Energy storage is quickly becoming a critical part of the distribution infrastructure, whose cost should be borne by the unpredictable intermittent producers.

It's not uncommon for the price of exported danish electricity to turn negative either.

As other say: it is converging to Hawaii-prices, but most of that is Taxation. In Denmark, the policy has been to put taxes on resource usage in the later years and not only on income. In this case the resource usage is on fossil fuels.

The slight problem with that model is that in principle, it should be cheaper when the energy is green, and more expensive when it is not. But the state has come to rely on the tax, so now it is a bit murky what it is really for.

Something I wrote in an earlier thread:

Denmark's electricity price is the highest in the EU "when you count in taxes and VAT, which go to produce other useful outcomes. However, Ireland together with the UK has the highest energy prices excluding taxes, closely followed by Cyprus and Spain. Interestingly enough, three of these are islands.

It would be interesting to see these prices without subsidies, as the energy market is pretty global and these big differences must come from something else, I think."

http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

It is really different, some people have variable pricing that changes monthly, and some have fixed pricing.

The cheapest fixed price I could find is $0.34 per kWh, on Elpristavlen[0] (lists of power prices)

DONG Energy[1] states a price of $0.27 per kWh.

Note that the price might not include power sources from renewable energy, and it excludes the subscription you pay to the power company.

[0] https://www.elpristavlen.dk/

[1] http://www.dongenergy-distribution.dk/erhverv/eldistribution...

Around 22 cents excl. VAT. 27 cents incl. VAT

You have not accounted for the difference between power and energy. 909 kilowatt hours (energy) divided by a month (720 hours) is an average of about 1250 watts (power).

So 400 megawatts might only power 300,000 US homes, but the scale is about right.

No, this is a correct figure. I think you are confusing power with energy. Also, the consumption of the average US home is a lot higher than in Europe.

400 MW not 400 MWh. The power generated by the wind farm is enough to power 400,000 homes at peak. The link you provided talks about energy generated.

This would equate to a constant 1kW load per home which looks about right on the face of it. In fact that's probably a bit high.

Ah, thanks for all the replies.

The charts I linked below [1] have a comparison for 2013-2014 for Germany (eg page 8). I assume the situation in Denmark might be similar.

There is also this statement:

" Wind power achieved a new record of 29.7 GW in peak power production at Friday, 12th of December 2014. The daily wind energy production was 562 GWh. Both figures represent new records. The last records of 5th of December 2013 with a maximum power of 26.3 GW and a daily energy of 485 GWh have been exceeded by 13% resp. 16%. Photovoltaic power reached a maximum of 4.9 GW at the same day. The maximum total power from solar and wind was about 34 GW, which is well below the maximum of 14.4.2014 when a total production of 38.8 GW was reached.

In order to provide sufficient space for the wind power in the grid, nuclear power plants have reduced their base load generation by about 10%, lignite plants by about 30%."

[1] http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files...

A few years ago I worked on software that manages selling electrical power from small decentralized power plants. When the wind isn't blowing the missing power can be supplied by electricity generated by plants that are built for generating heat. These are typically 2MW plants that can ramp up in 20 minutes or so, and they are scattered through out Denmark. These are all a mix of biomass, gas, oil or goal, or even garbage incinerators. The smallest one I saw was a large commercial greenhouse, with a 0.7MW generator. You bundle all the small plants up into 10MW packages and sell their potential output via www.nordpoolspot.com.

There's also a plan that involve simply pay large power consumers to halt production do compensate for missing electricity in the grid.

The Danish power grid is also closely linked to the those of Norway, Sweden and Germany, allowing export of cheap wind power, when there's a surplus and import of nuclear, hydro, coal and gas when there's no wind.

You're right in as so fare that wind power isn't magical, there needs to be a backup when the wind isn't blowing.

As long as the windpower installed reduces the need for baseline to be produced the efficiency can get pretty good indeed. No matter how high it goes this will not result in all baseline power generation being halted simply because it takes time to bring those plants online (shutting them down can go quite fast but ramping them back up takes time). Also, because of the inherent instability of renewables you always want to have a certain percentage of the current requirement available as non-renewable just in case.

Not sure if its the same for the Danes, but in the US coal is being displaced by natural gas, which can be throttled quickly for grid demand response (and is cleaner, and releases drastically less CO2 per unit of power generated, and can be moved across the country quicker via pipeline vs trains).

It's more complicated than a simple breakdown of "high price because of taxes".

Part of it, not shown in that breakdown below, is the "Public Service Obligation (PSO)" tariff DKK 0.214/kwh (USD 0.031/kwh), primarily used to subsidize renewable energy (http://energinet.dk/EN/El/Engrosmarked/Tariffer-og-priser/Si...). Given the wikipedia cited total price of ~USD 0.40/kwh, and the breakdown linked below showing that the actual cost of the electricity is only 18% of that, 7.2 cents per kwh, a 3.1 cent per kwh renewable energy subsidy is pretty significant...

Note that this subsidy has been going up with the increase in wind power. Q1 2014 price was DKK 0.19 - http://www.energinet.dk/EN/OM-OS/Nyheder/Sider/Energinet-dk-...)

"""For example, some wind turbines are guaranteed a fixed price for the electricity they generate.

The PSO tariff rises, as the electricity price is low at the moment and the difference between the amount the electricity consumers must pay for electricity and the amount some energy producers are guaranteed thus is more significant. Furthermore, Denmark will have more renewable energy. The objective is that 50% of all electricity must come from wind turbines by 2020. Finally, a new increased funding to electricity generated by biogas will enter into force - and must be paid out"""

See also, http://www.energinet.dk/EN/OM-OS/Nyheder/Sider/Energinet-dk-...

That is mostly due to extreme taxes.