Germany Learns the Hard Way: The Worst Way to Energy Security and Meeting Climate Goals Is the Green Way.
Back in 2015, just short of a decade ago, my late friend Nick Grealy, from the UK, wrote a blog post on the approaching collapse of the German Energiewende experiment. I featured it here and, although none of the illustrations still load, his observations have proved remarkably prescient, as a new study out of Norway reveals.
Let’s begin with some of what Nick pointed out almost 10 years ago:
No one can fail to be impressed by Germany’s efforts in the Energiewende, loosely translated as “energy turn” or “energy transformation.” But, is it no more than a relic of the peak oil and nuclear fears prevalent in 2009 post Fukushima? What is the view from 2015?
The Energiewende is giving shale operators world wide a lot of another German word import: Angst. Greens insist that there are a suite of alternatives to both fossil fuels and nuclear power and that Germany provides an example to the UK, Ireland, New York State etc etc. This from Mark Ruffalo for example:
Earlier in the interview, Ruffalo stressed the potential of renewable energy sources like “wind, water and solar.” Citing the prevalence of solar energy in Germany, Ruffalo remarked “America’s being left behind. We’re being left behind all over the world.”
In the interview, Ruffalo misspoke in stating that 30 percent of Germany’s electricity is generated from solar power — the figure is actually three percent. Although he was mistaken, he later apologized on Twitter.
That makes it all better then. Three percent, thirty percent, it’s only a number. Mr Ruffalo’s apology gets read by several thousand Twitter followers, but it was already crossed into the minds of a million plus TV viewers. This rather cavalier carelessness is being used by natural gas opponents to magnify both opposition to shale development and to stretch the truth of solar and wind reality to fit a view that as renewables are just around the corner, let’s call the whole thing off.
Before I look at Die wahre Wirklichkeit der deutschen Energiepolitik or the true reality of German energy policy, which just doesn’t slip off the tongue, or enter into the brain, as elegantly as Energiewende, let me point out two things:
Talking about reality may be uncomfortable, but it does keep the lights and heat on. Pointing out contradictions does not make me a climate change “denier”, or part of an alleged lobbying conspiracy from fossil fuels. Unlike too many greens, I don’t deny the utility of their technologies.The ultimate lobbyist for fossil fuel is anyone who flips a light switch, fills a fuel tank or participates in modern life of plastics and fertilisers. Look in the mirror. Wave hello…
Solar is an inevitable part of the future. It is not, nor is likely to be in any meaningful time frame, the only solution. Pretending it can, is unrealistic and counterproductive and recent, if uncomfortable, proof of that comes from The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems.
A fundamental energy problem, is how almost everyone wants to believe (Greens), or publishes (journalists) simplistic explanations of complex energy market phenomena. Energy is not simple. The world behind the switch or the nozzle is incredibly complex. The problem lies in that a lot of people work very hard to make it look easy – and have been very successful at it. Perhaps too successful…
The key point, on the Mark Ruffalo’s of the world miss, is to concentrate on how electricity is produced, when the problem is also of when it is produced. With no significant technology to store electricity at scale on the horizon,electricity generation is skewed in many counter intuitive ways…
With no energy storage, one could potentially generate a lot of electricity, but obviously, if perhaps not to Ruffalo, not very much outside of the middle of the day in the middle of the year and absolutely none in the night anytime. Using solar to keep the lights on during daytime defeats the point of energy efficiency perhaps, but as we’ll see, there is a lot of electricity still used at midday, although solar, in one of several perverse impacts, doesn’t provide any energy efficiency incentives at peak time…
Time here to step back and consider measuring the Energiewende success as reducing emissions. But, that isn’t so interesting to either Greens or journalists. This from the German Federal Energy Statistics, based on BP World Energy shows the relative performance of German CO2 emissions is poor compared to other advanced economies. Even worse, when measured over the past few years, despite a greater rate of growth of wind and solar, German CO2 emissions actually increased 6% as opposed to standing still in the US and falling by an average of 4% in the EU as a whole…
Ruffalo is correct: Germany does indeed produce 30% of it’s power from solar, a noteworthy accomplishment. However, it does so at noon in late June and generates zero of it only twelve hours later. During January, given how Hamburg shares the same latitude as the Alaska Panhandle, it is equally impressive to generate any solar at all, but what little there is disappears entirely 19 hours a day- during the highest demand time of year…
The beauty of natural gas is that it can be flexible enough to ramp up and down matching demand, and to match the inevitable ups and downs, storms and calms and sunrises and sunsets inherent in wind and solar. It was only a few years ago that natural gas was only used as peaking power to match spikes. As we see in the US, natural gas is now so widespread and thus economically predictable that it replaces the original baseload power provider, nuclear energy. That is yet another own goal by Germany: Not only does lignite displace gas, Germany is intending to displace zero carbon nuclear with renewables. If Germany played like this in the World Cup, they wouldn’t last long.
Now, let’s compare that with some of the results from the Norwegian study (emphasis added):
There is a considerable debate in many countries as to the path going forward concerning climate policy and energy policy. More than 22 countries signed an agreement in COP28 in Dubai committing themselves to tripling the nuclear capacity by 2050 (Donovan Citation2023). This makes environmental sense since nuclear power scores the best on most overall environmental impact assessment metrics (UNECE Citation2021) including lifecycle Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Others, such as Germany, have closed down the Nuclear Power Plants (NPP) and aimed for energy transition based on bioenergy and Variable Renewable Energy (VRE) such as wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) power. There could hardly be a larger difference in policy.
Thus, this paper poses the simple question – what if Germany had spent their money on nuclear power and not followed their policy from 2002 through 2022 (20 years); would Germany have achieved more emission reductions and lower expenses? To answer this research question requires first an assessment of the results of the German policy covering the period of 2002 through 2022 to establish a baseline. Then, two choices occur that could have been dealt with independently given Germany’s long nuclear history and competence – (1) to keep existing NPPs running, and/or (2) to invest in new NPPs. As noted, Germany has opted out of both these choices and invested in VREs, which makes the case particularly interesting…
The development of the power capacities of Germany during the 20-year period is shown [below]:
We see that nuclear power is completely missing from the mix by 2023, whereas renewables including hydro, biomass and VREs grew substantially. Natural gas also grew significantly by 71% pushing the total fossil capacity up by 7%. Overall, the capacities of the power system grew by 111%…
The years 2011, 2021 and 2023 accounted for 74% of nuclear phaseout. The mid-2010s were good years for wind power capacity expansions whereas solar photovoltaics (PV) grew at an almost exponential rate (apart from the latter half of the 2010s) with 2023 reaching 13.2 GW of added capacity and therefore surpassing the record nuclear phaseout of 9.4 GW in 2011 following the Fukushima diaster…
[We see in the chart below] that the electricity production first increased a little and then fell so that the net results for the period is a small decline despite an overall increase in capacity of 111%. As a reference, assuming a Power Capacity Factor (PCF) of 90%, the 23,538 MW of nuclear power in 2002 would itself have given 186 TWh/yr. This can only be achieved by baseload operation.
Note that there is an interesting phenomenon called ‘global stilling’ because it essentially implies less wind physically speaking. Since 1980, the effect is about 10% reduction globally (19% in Europe) until 2020 with some variations according to season and month (Zhou et al. Citation2021). The exact causes behind this are still being researched, but it shows the weather risks introduced directly into the power system not by the typical hourly variation of the wind but by its very existence in some years and longer periods.
The impact of high increases in capacity and almost no change in electricity production gives a predictable increase in electricity costs and subsequently prices as any official statistics of Germany will show…
The paper has attempted to estimate the expenditures and climate gas reductions of the current energy transition policy known as Energiewende, pursued by Germany over the last 20 years. The results are subsequently compared to an alternative policy where NPPs in 2002 are kept in operation and new additional NPPs are built. There are many aspects not covered in this simple analysis, which means that keeping an eye on assumptions is important.
However, regardless of uncertainties in data and assumptions, there can be no doubt that if the political environment in Germany had been favourable to NPPs in 2002, the country would have fared far better than with the current Energiewende both concerning expenditures and climate gas emissions. In the grand scheme, the alternative policy of keeping existing NPPs in 2002 and building new NPPs would have cut expenditures in half and Germany would have secured its climate goals in the process.
So, Nick Grealy was correct in virtually everything he observed years ago; the Energiewende was a huge failure. Natural gas has saved the day to a large extent and if Germany had kept and expanded its nuclear while developing its own natural gas resources they would met their goals (silly as they may be) at half the costs. And, Germany is the model every blue state here in the U.S. wants to imitate. Try to make sense out of that and you’ll realize it was all about the virtue signaling and, especially, the grifting opportunities.
#Germany #Electricity #Energiewende #Grid #EnergySecurity #Nuclear
