Category: Germany

China: 1,000 More Coal Power Plants Exporting Power All The Way To Germany

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1,000 more coal power plants for China. And then power exports all the way to Germany.

Coal!!!!

China’s proposed investments in long-distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) power transmission lines will pave the way for power exports as far as Germany, the head of the national power grid said on Tuesday as he launched an initiative for cross-border power connections

Exporting power to central Asia and beyond falls into China’s “one belt, one road” ambitions to export industrial overcapacity and engineering expertise as it faces slowing growth at home. The plan would allow enormous hydropower dams, coal-fired power plants and wind farms in frontier regions such as Xinjiang to sell into higher-priced markets overseas. The “belt” refers to the land route from Asia to Europe, while the “road”, curiously, refers to the sea route via the Indian Ocean.

Talk of exporting power is a reversal for China, which as recently as 2004 suffered rolling blackouts across its manufacturing heartland. But huge investments in power in the decade since, and the construction of a number of dams, nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants due to begin operating in the next 10 years, mean the country faces a growing surplus.

Liu Zhenya, chairman of State Grid, told reporters that wind and thermal power produced in Xinjiang could reach Germany at half the current cost of electricity there. “There are so many resources, but no market. We need to find it externally.”

 

 

 

Word of the Day: Dunkelflaute

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Word of the day:

In German, the term Dunkelflaute is used to describe the predicament. Dunkel means “dark”; solar is simply not available half the time, and solar power production is significant for only around six hours a day even when the sun is shining. Flaute is “doldrums” – when the wind is not blowing. So the “dark doldrums” are times when solar and wind power is not available in sufficient amounts.

This chart is just wind+solar for March in Germany. Red lines are periods less than 5GW.

APr_8_2016

Opinion: Fukushima 5 years on – ‘The Germans are crazy’

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There are still eight nuclear power plants on the German energy grid; once there were almost twenty. In six years the last eight will also have been shut down. No more controversies in parliament, no more public debates. It is easy to overlook the fact that a special commission is discussing just how much it will cost to dismantle what is left of Germany’s nuclear energy program, and who will have to pay for it. The energy companies? Or will taxpayers get stuck with the bill in the end? It is a debate for insiders.

Read more: http://www.dw.com/en/opinion-fukushima-5-years-on-the-germans-are-crazy/a-19109743

Just remember March 7 2016 (not that unusual) when wind dropped to essentially zero.

Or March 5th when uranium supplied 24.4% and wind 4.6%.

Capture

 

 

 

Germany Will Need 3,000 Wind Turbines To Replace One Nuke Plant

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Insane: Germany Will Need 3,000 Wind Turbines To Replace This Workhorse Nuke Plant

“Germany’s Grohnde nuclear power plant in Lower Saxony has just become the single most productive power plant in history. It just passed its 350 billion kWh production milestone, the most of any nuclear plant, and the most of any plant of its size in the world.”

“Unfortunately, Grohnde is scheduled to close in 2021, decades ahead of its useful life, like all of Germany’s nuclear plants, and the positive and negative affects of that policy are still being debated.

In 2001, Gerhard Schröder’s government decided to get rid of nuclear power from the country as fast as possible. In 2010, Merkel actually decided to extend the lives of nuclear power plants another ten years beyond Schröder’s limit. But the Fukushima disaster in 2011 forced her politically to revert back to the original plan, closing eight nuclear plants immediately and planning to close the rest in the following 10 years.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/03/21/the-little-reactor-that-could-germanys-grohnde-nuclear-plant/

German power companies have been forced to set aside 39 billion Euros for the nuke decommissioning.

And most likely Germany will still be burning huge amounts of brown coal long after the last nuke is shutdown.

 

 

The East Germans Have Successfully Take Over German Climate Policy

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What was once launched as a – well-intentioned – green energy revolution has now mutated into a giant VEB [i.e. East German state company]. In Gabriel’s system electricity production is no longer determined by demand – as is usual in a market economy. It is not demand that determines supply – but the subsidy billions. Produced is only what wind and solar power and feed-in tariffs expensively allow, not what the public and the economy need – cheap energy. In Gabriel’s national energy system there is an ideological distinction between “good” (green) and “evil” (traditional) energy. Therefore, even profitable and clean gas power plants are switched off – as just happened to Europe’s most modern gas-fired power plant in Irsching. Instead, new subsidy-fed projects are connected to the grid without the necessary network capacity and without the necessary storage technology. For these intermittent power plants, coal power plants have to be kept running as backups, which in turn emit a lot more CO2, which now are also extra-taxed. It all feels like socialist self-perpetuating: this energy revolution cannot be stopped. 

 

http://www.thegwpf.com/the-madness-of-germanys-energy-socialism/

Oooops. Germany Forgot About Eclipses

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Oooops. Germany Forgot About Eclipses and their effect on a power grid with lots of expensive solar.

The German power grid operators are dreading March 20, 2015. On this day Germany will see a partial solar eclipse during the morning. Should there be no clouds in the sky at this time, all solar power generating systems all over the country would be feeding in drastically less power into the grid in just a matter of minutes – and the grids would become dangerously destabilized.”

Read the rest at NoTricksZone.

 

Coal: China vs Germany

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China’s economy continues to drive ahead powered by coal. They consume 50% of the world production. The use the cheap electricity produced by burning coal to manufacture inexpensive goods and then sell them all over the world.

Germany, on the other hand, has chosen to use cheap electricity to subsidize wind turbines and solar panels.

“At the center of Europe’s coal renaissance is the region around the German-Polish border, already home to five of Europe’s most polluting coal plants, says the report, which was compiled by CAN Europe, WWF, the European Environmental Bureau, the Health and Environment Alliance and Climate Alliance Germany. Swedish power firm Vattenfall GmbH is now planning to expand the number of open-cast mines in the Lausitz area to exploit its deposits of  lignite, a particularly polluting type of coal.

Vattenfall says the Lausitz mines, with their vast deposits, are there to take up the slack when renewable energy sources fail to meet Germany’s needs. “Without flexible and reliable brown coal, we wouldn’t be able to provide stable electricity supplies at stable prices,” the company says on its website.”

http://www.thegwpf.com/europes-coal-renaissance-undermines-it-green-credentials/

 

India: Greenpeace Are Economic Terrorists

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” India’s domestic spy service has accused Greenpeace and other lobby groups of hurting economic progress by campaigning against power projects, mining and genetically modified food, the most serious charge yet against foreign-funded organisations.”

“Greenpeace denied it was trying to block economic expansion”

“Seventy million households – 35-40 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people – still have no access to electricity. This summer authorities in north India are battling power breakdowns and public anger as the country swelters under the longest heatwave on record.

The Intelligence Bureau said the foreign NGOs and their Indian arms were serving as tools advance Western foreign policy interests.”

Greenpeace believed that India should embrace renewable energy and improve energy efficiency … 

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2014/06/12/uk-india-projects-idUKKBN0EN1CV20140612

 

How can rich white people headquartered in Germany hate the poor brown in India so much they deny them the chance of having electricity?

How can you improve the energy efficiency of ZERO electricity for 40% of  the people. 500 million people without electricity.

And all the while Germany gets over 50% of its electricity from dirty brown lignite coal

There is a new government in India, and I suspect Greenpeace et al will be facing life and death choices for choosing to condemn so many Indians to poverty.

Germany Mocks Obama By Burning More Brown Coal

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Germany has decided to mock Obama’s plan to kill off coal power in the USA:

“The eastern German state of Brandenburg approved plans on Tuesday to allow utility Vattenfall to mine a further 200 million tonnes of brown coal from 2026, a move critics say will cause pollution and also force 800 people from their homes.

Brown coal – also known as lignite – has a high moisture content and can be susceptible to spontaneous combustion, making it difficult to store and transport. Therefore, it is often burnt in power stations near to mines. It also emits more carbon dioxide when burnt compared with other types of coal, making it more harmful to the environment.

Opponents of the fuel, which accounts for about a quarter of German power, have campaigned hard for its use to be halted because of the high levels of carbon dioxide emissions and because they say about 800 local residents will be forced to relocate to make way for the new open-cast mining.

But its advocates say brown coal allows the use of domestic raw materials for a reliable source of electricity, especially in industrial parts of Germany, and reduces the need for energy imports.”

Germany is now squandering trillions on “green” energy subsidies … and paying for them by burning even more filthy brown coal. They could have been fracking for clean natural gas. But no … they shut down their nuclear power stations too.

http://www.thegwpf.org/german-state-allows-huge-expansion-of-brown-coal-mining/