Could we run our society on renewable energy sources, which now deliver electricity cheaper than fossil fuel produced power? Vaclav Smil has just published figures on Germany’s efforts to move towards a high penetration renewable system, showing that the cost is likely to be very high.
After the Fukushima nuclear accident Germany decided to close its nuclear reactors and cut back on fossil fuel uses by making an enthusiastic commitment to renewable energy sources. For some time Smil has been warning that the shift to renewables will be more time consuming and difficult than most people think. He has just drawn attention to some data summarising Germany’s achievements over the past twenty years.
In 2019 Germany produced about as much electricity as in 2000; only 5% more. In that period renewable generating capacity rose by 80%, but the amount of electricity generated by fossil fuels fell only from 84% to 78%. The addition of renewables didn’t replace fossil fuel use, renewable sources were added to the existing generating system, which had to be largely retained to deal with the intermittency of the renewables.
Smil says Germany now has two systems, a renewable one which supplies 41% of electricity demand and a fossil fuelled one which has to be resorted to when the renewable input is down. This means the capacity factor for the fossil fuelled system is low, increasing the cost of its input. “Germany needs to keep the old system in order to meet demand on cloudy and calm days and to produce nearly half of total demand.”
Smil points out that if the building of renewable capacity continued at this rate fossil fuels would still be “ … providing nearly 70 percent of the country’s primary energy supply in 2050.”
The result of this situation is very expensive power. Smil says the cost of electricity in the US is 13 cents per kWh, and in Germany it is 35 cents per kWh.
Europe can experience weeks of continuous very cold, calm and cloudy weather in winter. Germany’s situation would be far worse if it could not draw on Scandanavian hydro storage capacity or French nuclear plants when renewables are down, or export surpluses to other countries. Smil says that even now there are times when 90% of the renewable output has to be exported or dumped. The extent to which intermittent input varies is easily overlooked.
Thus the essential question for advocates of 100% renewable energy supply is not can it be done, but at what cost. Australia has hardly any backup/storage problem to deal with at present. Germany has found that to deal with the problem required building a renewable system as big as the existing fossil fuel system. The amount of back/storage capacity needed to deal with intermittent sources escalates rapidly as the renewable contribution goes from 50% towards 100%.
Australia’s renewable sources are much more favourable than Germany’s, but the same issue remains; how much redundancy and storage at what cost would have to be built, to achieve high penetration or total elimination of carbon-based generation? This cannot be answered without many more “simulation” studies which attempt to work out what pattern of renewables based at what locations could meet demand all the time, at minimum cost.
These studies are difficult and costly, and vary significantly in conclusions. Few have been carried out for Australia. Unfortunately findings vary significantly with assumptions, and all involve uncertain and challengeable assumptions. My impression is that a reliable high penetration system using Andrew Blaker’s pumped hydro approach to storage might be feasible, but at what cost? The point is that we are far from settling the issue.
But all that is only about electricity supply, and that’s the easy task. About 80% of energy needed at present is not in the form of electricity. Converting from electricity to other forms of energy is very costly in terms of energy losses, plant required and thus dollars. If you want to provide transport fuel for instance via hydrogen or ammonia produced from solar panels then each kWh of energy reaching your vehicle’s wheels will require PV or wind sources to generate about 5 to 10 kWh of electricity. Even if we transformed as many functions as possible to electricity, e.g., light vehicles, my attempt to work out the amount of generating capacity needed concluded that the total cost would be far beyond affordable. We need more studies of that kind, that is, dealing with the total energy economy.
So the fact that a kWh of electricity can now be produced more cheaply by renewable than by fossil fuel generation is misleading. It tells us little about the cost of producing it by a system that has so much backup and storage plant that demand can be met all the time. Germany’s experience shows that the energy problem is much more difficult than the typical greenie realises.
The answer to the energy problem, and all the other big problems now threatening our existence including resource scarcity, environmental destruction, resource wars and crumbling social cohesion, is not to be found where they are looking for it, that is on the supply side. This society is far beyond sustainable levels of resource consumption, yet its supreme goal is to constantly increase living standards and GDP without limit. The solution can only be found on the demand side, that is, by shifting to much simpler lifestyles and systems.
This is not an argument against renewables. We must move to 100% renewable energy supply as fast as possible … but there is a strong case and many analysts arguing that we cannot do it unless we abandon the suicidal quest for limitless affluence and growth. This is increasingly being understood; at last we now have a global ‘de-growth’ movement.
Ted Trainer is a retired lecturer from the School of Social Work, University of New South Wales. He is developing Pigface Point, a sustainability educational site near Sydney, and a website for use by critical global educators.
Comments
11 responses to “The German experience – running everything on renewable energy”
It seems two important facts have been overlooked:
1. Fossil fuel energy has always been heavily subsidised
2. In spite of the handouts and prior to Australia paying for so called renewables “back-up” as in Germany, electricity costs here have already been increasing exponentially over the last 20 years.
Any argument about cost of renewables must begin from a fully disclosed level playing field. This article does not do that and in this age of corporate / government secrecy I’m not sure its even possible to know the full extent of corporate welfare. What we do know is they are subsidised at the front end and avoid taxes at the back end.
Right there we have the real problem of “cost” comparison.
The final paragraph is a good conclusion however it’s almost as if it doesn’t belong to the article as it is a summary for an entirely different premise.
Off to the naughty corner, Ted. Just because anthropogenic mass now exceeds natural biomass, it doesn’t mean we can’t have UN Sustainable Development plus UN Net Zero. What are you, a racist or something?
I am surprised that such an article would be printed on P&I, although the last two paragraphs possibly gets the Ted Trainer past the “gate keeper”.
As a farmer I am a very practicable person. We run a considerable number of livestock, all our animals are dependent on water pumped by renewables. As we farm in South Western Victoria, we too like Germany experience long periods of overcast calm weather. No wind plus no sun, = no Water? To ensure our animals don’t die of thirst during these periods we have large water storage. So we understand some of the electricity problems as there are many similarities. And like water, electricity only runs one way! It seems few politicians and their cohorts understand these practicalities. Australia always has sun or wind somewhere, but that is not enough. As electricity like water has to flow from the point of generation to the point of use, there is another profound problem, -the Grid.! It was designed to take electricity from the point of generation, the coal mine to the consumer. One way. It was not designed to handle the dispersed generation system we have now created from wind and sun. And of course we have the issue of storage; -slowly creeping into the psychic of policy makers.
Ineptness in all this has created a huge mess; something a humble farmer could have alerted the Nation to a long time ago. But would they listen?
And as for people living a simpler life style. Forget it! Not unless of course our foreign policy “spooks” make us all very poor and that’s a real possibility!
‘Renewable energy’ also includes the burning of biomass in the form of timber harvested from America, and then imported into Germany. While calling it ‘renewable’ may be semantically correct, the timber consumed emits more co2 than the coal the Germans are leaving in the ground.
Ted Trainer is a retired lecturer on Social Work. He has no qualifications in energy systems. He’s also a well-know “sceptic” of renewable energy.
The costs of various forms of electricity generation are well documented. The Lazard studies are case in point. Lazard are financial consultants. Their interest is in the money. They don’t care about the technologies. The firm has more than a century of experience in financial analysis. I know of no more credible source.
https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-and-levelized-cost-of-storage-2020/
I’m with Ted, as summarised in his last paragraph.
And, when it’s too late, we all will be!
David, yes the cost of generating I kWh by renewables is low but you seem to have missed the point; the cost of generating 1kWh in a system with so much back up and storage capacity that it can meet 100% of demand all the time is very unlikely to be low, and could well be unaffordable.
By the way I was not a Social Worker; I was a lecturer in Sociology within a Social Work school. What I was doesn’t matter, what matters is whether analyses are sound; maybe have a look at the paper published in Energy Policy mentioned in the article and let me know where it’s mistaken.
The nub of the argument for, or against any particular form of power generation, is to be found in the last paragraph. The wealth we presently enjoy is, largely, the outcome of abundant and cheap energy. Historically, this was only sourced from fossil fuels. What has tended to happen, and this was first identified by William Jevons around 150 years ago. The Jevons Paradox is that as we produce more electricity, or power generally and produce it more efficiently, instead of finding ways to use less power, we find ways to consume more. In the modern era, bigger houses, bigger LED TV’s, multiple TV’s and computer’s, fridges that connect to the internet, more and more appliances – we are not interested in finding ways for us to use less power. What we really want is for the government to act on climate change, but to also make our power abundant AND cheap. It is also thus with motor vehicles. By any logic, cars should be more efficient, use way less fuel and less emissions. But, it turns out that in Australia at least, the average fuel economy of our road vehicle fleet is no better than it was in 1970 and yet we are livid when fuel prices rise. Cars now continue, on average, to get bigger, with more power and with SUV’s and dual-cab utes in particular, there are now 200 million of these on the world’s roads and the impact of that category of vehicle on global emissions is measurable, substantial and growing (next to power generation, the rise in emissions of SUV’s and dual-cabs over the last decade outstrips every other category, including regular cars that reduced, on average, but aout 7%). And yet, if 100 people went out to buy a new vehicle tomorrow, at least 50% of them would buy an SUV or dual-cab. Yes, climate change is real, but while more of us make noise about governments and action on climate change, at an individual level, we are using more power than ever before. We’re obsessed with affluence and we’re not yet ready to make smarter choices.
The stumbling block is democracy. People who have been sucked into driving towering, gas-guzzling vehicles, and into other unsustainable aspects of our way of life, rule the country; or more accurately, the people who have sucked them into it rule the country. The rule of expertise that might save humanity is defeated by the exploiters of the individual’s desire, amongst other weaknesses, to feel less threatened and more threatening on the roads.
I agree. The rise and further rise of SUV’s on urban roads hasn’t happened in a vacuum. Manufacturers love them because they are high profit (they’re bigger, so we pay more for them, without them necessarily being more costly to manufacture – yes, we are that stupid). Those who crave visible affluence are an easy target for marketing (they are all “built for attention” – the focus of every ad in one form or another). But for “urban warriors”, which is to say those who treat every encounter with another motorist as a “war that can only be won or lost”, SUV’s and dual-cabs provide the perfect means of intimidation – an automotive and cultural “middle finger” if you will. This, sadly, seems to me to be a dominant motive behind the thirst for bigger and bigger SUV’s – a clear trend and one that has really accelerated now that US models are entering the Australian market.
What’s the cost of making earth uninhabitable for humans?