This puts wind and hydro at around 42%.
https://www.scottishrenewables.com/sectors/renewables-in-num...
The net effect of this is that electricity originally generated by nuclear plants and other fossil fuel plants gets 'converted' into (more expensive!) 'green' energy.
It's a kind of white-washing for electrons. The price difference can be substantial more than making up for the cost of the pumping and subsequent re-generation.
And of course it's the energy sold to the public that matters, not how it was originally generated so by double counting this energy it changes the balance considerably without there actually being more renewable energy to begin with.
http://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/en/downloads-englisch/pdf-files...
There is an extensive planning process with weather forecasts and peak consumption predictions (break in the football world cup finals for example) to prevent sudden surprising changes. Different kind of power plants have different timelines that it takes to power them up and down. Small peaks in demand can be covered with gas plants since they are very fast to power up and down, but they are expensive. Coal plants take a day, nuclear - forget it-, and solar and wind can be predicted fairly well with the weather (there are plots about the success of predictions in the pdf), water is fairly stable and biomass behaves like gas. You really only want to produce what is consumed, and then there's export and import. There are charts for that as well.
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.
But wouldn't it be true to say that store is the cheaper alternative to installing excess capacity, the alternative with less local resistance (a political issue with both on and offshore wind), and the alternative with fewer maintenance issues versus e.g. offshore wind? Let me know if you have any numbers on that.
I've checked some numbers myself. For example, even domestic storage (which includes things like an inverter already) like the Tesla powerwall costs $3500, and has 5.000 full depth cycles of lifetime, and a capacity of 7 kwh. Meaning purely for storing and using 1 kwh, it's about $10c. That's more than the cost of onshore wind (about 7c or so, differs per country).
But we know that utility scale batteries can be much cheaper (I mean these Tesla powerwalls are quite similar to batteries that go into cars, their energy density is very high due to space constraints. If space and weight is not a concern you can build cheaper batteries), plus batteries as an industry are currently on a much steeper decline in cost annually than renewable generation technologies so going in to the future storage should become much more attractive, even as extra generation becomes more attractive, too.
One example is Alevo, found an interesting post about it I'll quote here: > Alevo is claiming $100/kWh and 40,000 cycles. That works out to $0.003/cycle. Financed for 20 years at 5% would mean a $0.022 price per cycle over the first 20 years and then the cost of storage dropping to roughly zero for 89 more years.
That's 2-3 cents per cycle. It'd be really hard to make the case for excess wind capacity over storage. Particularly because on some days wind generation is still near zero. The image I showed shows the top day generating 200x as much as the bottom day. To generate enough on the bottom day, you need a ridiculous amount of excess capacity generation to compensate, capacity that may be more expensive per kwh than storage, that overproduces the rest of the year (while still costing money, unlike storage which costs money per cycle, i.e. when used), and exacerbates the non-financial issues of wind (e.g. landscape changes that local people resist).
It's looking like storage is going to be playing a huge role.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/lets-build-...
I at least don't know yet how it's going to shape up.
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.
Right now the various grid operators pay huge money to get renewable producers to shut off production. This is not ideal.
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.
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/...
Of the four you mention, three aren't connected to that grid, and I would guess the link with Spain doesn't have sufficient capacity to even out peaks and troughs in Spanish demand (http://ses.jrc.ec.europa.eu/power-system-modelling does show a fairly thin line between France and Spain, both large countries in population)
The above is 100% educated GUESS. Corrections welcome.
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...
If not, what percentage of total electricity use are we talking about?
If or if not, what percentage of total power use are we talking about?
The author mentions a 400 MW wind farm, and then says that correlates to 400,000 homes. Unless homes in Denmark use only 3% of what homes in the US use on average[1], that number should be somewhere closer to 15,000 homes.
So 400 megawatts might only power 300,000 US homes, but the scale is about right.
If 39% of Danes' electricity completely displaced the same amount of fossil fuels, my jaw would hit the floor.
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...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electricity-prices-europe...
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-...
https://www.energifyn.dk/privat/elhandel/bag-om-elprisen
Orange is tax, grey is VAT, yellow also has some tax-like elements.
_(EUR_per_kWh)_YB15.png){kind=link}
